


Anywhere On This Road

by garnettrees



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies), Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Alien Rituals, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Arranged Marriage, BAMF Winona Kirk, Bones is So Done, Colonization, Custody Battle, Dammit Jim, Fate & Destiny, Fictional Religion & Theology, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Intrigue, M/M, Magic and Science, Mind Meld, Psychic Bond, Sort Of, Soul Bond, Soulmates, Starfleet, Starfleet Brass, T'hy'la, Tarsus IV, Telepathic Bond, Vulcan, Vulcan Culture, Vulcans Being High-handed, Vulnerable Spock
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-02-28
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2019-11-07 00:12:26
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,701
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17949863
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/garnettrees/pseuds/garnettrees
Summary: In a universe perhaps three standard deviations from Prime, a single highly secret ritual has survived Surak's Reform to subtly impact the galaxy, even down to Federation by-laws. When a young Spock discovers the most sacred of connections, all Winona Kirk knows is that the Vulcans want her son. No Kirk ever gives up without a fight, and the choices she is about to make will have a profound effect on that which is meant to be.Destiny is self-correcting, and will not be denied.





	1. The Watcher

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> K/S has such a rich history of wonderful fic, it's more than a little intimidating to finally try my hand at what was, essentially, my OTP before I knew what OTPs were. ^_~ I'm not going to pretend that this premise is completely original, but hopefully I can at least come at it from an interesting angle. While I definitely wrote this with TOS in mind, it probably works for AOS too, since I have taken some liberties with canon. I'd love to know what you think!
> 
>  **Trigger Warnings** : Not much for this first chapter, save some brief horror imagery and depiction of large-scale violence associated with Vulcan history.  
>  **Other Warnings/Enticements:** Utterly smitten bb!Spock, unapologetic use of the soul-mates trope.

_My heart is breaking_  
_I cannot sleep_  
_I love a man_  
_who's afraid of me._  
_He believes if he does not_  
_stand guard with a knife,_  
_I will make him my slave for_  
_the rest of his life._  
-"Anywhere on This Road" by Lhasa

 

 

The Forge is Eternal.

The vast, unforgiving expanse sprawls beyond the jagged mountains which guard its periphery, an almost circular depression so massive it seems without end. Flat as the pavilion before any temple, its wind-worn rocks are battered and subjugated, their infrequent protrusions quickly lost amidst the incarnadine horizon and the limitations of organic visual perception. Red sand, like the detritus of rust from the machinery of time itself, has collected here over eons untold. Since the Beginning, Surak says-- a beginning which was preceded, the great teacher adds in one of his few recorded contradictory statements, by Time Out of Mind.

Here the ambitions of warlords and kings have been shattered; here the enemies of Tu-Surak fled and slew one another with their passions and infighting even before the desert could devour them. Whole tribes-- lost, disoriented by the Forge's unpredictable simooms-- perished of thirst in attempted crossings, their bones scoured clean by winds until at last these too were worn away into particulate now indifferently mixed with the native granular silicate. 

Once, every five _tevun_ , a caravan of modern Vulcans makes a pilgrimage deep within this purgatory to trod upon their ancestors; in their footsteps, on their unmarked graves, and the faint irradiated traces of their ultimate-- and ultimately nameless-- Violation. 

 

_'Tonight, I discover if I shall ever find purpose,_ ' Spock thinks for the ninth time since departure. Despite the rather pointless nature of the repetition (such an obvious fact is, after all, no mantra), it still helps him sit straight-backed and stoic atop his unevenly plodding _dzharel_. Already he has been in the saddle 46.31 hours, and he is ill-accustomed to it. In deference to the nature of the Forge-- considered at once blasphemous and sacrosanct-- only this mode of transportation is permitted, astride animals bred for this purpose alone. These descendants of long-ago pack animals tolerate their Vulcan riders well given that they are also unaccustomed to the situation, being otherwise housed on comfortable preserves. All exploitation of lesser beings is forbidden, not merely their culling for meat. It is only the fact of their pre-Reform domestication that makes the Vulcan people stewards of these creatures, as with sehlats. Despite the lengthy and entwined history of their two species, the relationship is now somewhat uneasy. They are no longer quite used to one another, and the myriad scents of Forge make it clear to the caravan beasts that they are no longer within their sanctuary. At least their skittishness has diminished now they they are firmly in the depths of the Forge. During the initial stages of the journey, both rider and _dzharel_ alike kept careful watch against _mor'gril_ and _le-matya_ , but there is no need at present. Nothing lives and nothing grows in the inner reaches of this desert. The sky, quiet at the moment, is torn so easily by sudden fluctuations in magnetic fields, coriolis effect, and associated large-scale wind patterns that even the airspace-- avoided by native avians-- is closed to both flyer and atmospheric shuttle.

Spock's mount is patient and well-tempered, but the saddle is hard and balance difficult to maintain. He has been employing basic pain meditation to obviate the distress since the first sundown of their journey, but his training has not yet reached the second stage. During the day, Eridani A-- a pleasant and quotidian environmental factor in ShiKahr-- beats down upon the caravan with all the relentlessness he remembers from the _kahs-wan_ , scathing little fingers which seek to eliminate even the slightest respite from heat. At night, the breaths of both beasts and riders are visible, billowing wisps of white like exotic Terran clouds, which are made of water vapor and not merely dust. The stars too are constant in their hard brilliance, largely unblinking due to the thinner atmosphere, outlining the crematory sands with their feeble, outdated light. 

 

If the Forge is a place of half-forgotten trespass, it is also an expression of the present Vulcan psyche. Once truly in the midst of the great cavity, the horizon line becomes a stark delineation in all directions, abstemious and stern. Even the ponderous peaks of Mount Seleya, now to the procession's back, are from this vantage point naught but a wrinkle in the otherwise perfect symmetry. The landscape has but one adornment, and it too adheres to the strictures of geometry and spartan aesthetics. Since the afternoon of the very first day, a great foreshortened tower has been rising higher and higher, splitting the place where the sand meets the sky at a perfect right angle. Its onyx stones are so polished their gleam is painful even when it appears merely a needle in the distance. Another sight from his _kahs-wan_ though, since the ritual was undertaken at the outer reaches of the Forge, it was never more than a glimmering warning to mark the wrong direction. Setting off as they did from ShiKahr, their party in fact passed through the area of Spock's ordeal; inhospitable, possibly fatal, but not the outright death sentence the of the inner Forge itself. 

And if there stood a distant way from the track a little cairn of laboriously gathered stones, only some of which had fallen in the intervening years, Spock pretended not to notice.  
It was the wind which caused his eyes

( _he has human eyes, they look sad--_ )

to prickle, that is all. 

 

The tower, their destination, is also a type of cairn. Millions of gigantic slabs, ebony and obsidian and night-blasted andesite hewn so perfectly they fit together without mortar. Despite its perfect angles and unforgiving rectilineal nature, there hovers about the site some vague anthropomorphism-- repugnant to post-Reform Vulcans, and therefore studiously ignored. It is one thing to depict ancestors within dim cathedrals of museums, archives, and clan halls, but quite another to tolerate an icon so enormous being given a facsimile of life. The megalithic construction has no face, no features to enforce the notion; still, it is omnipresent sentinel in the apotheosis of deserts, and it is betrayed by its name. The Watcher of Watchers, a separate and eons old entity. Poised above the wavering desert, it seems the very stylus which drew the landscape into being.  
And, in a way, it is. 

_'This comes down to us, unchanged, from the beginning.'_ T'Pau herself had said, undertaking the ancient chant prior to their departure. _It is the Vulcan heart-- the Vulcan soul.'_

 

The health of the caravan necessitates swift travel, and their schedule has been further facilitated by the weather-- atypically calm for this season. Perspective and steady pace render the Watcher of Watchers (sometimes also called _K'lek Tel-alep_ , though it is generally not spoken of in prosaic context at all) thicker now, its contrast against the sky more striking with each hoof-beat. The eye may now discern details, begin to comprehend the sheer number of megalithic slabs which have gone into the site's construction. They will reach the cyclopean base by sundown of this day, as is customary. During the novitiate, Spock will be permitted one sip of water, his first since the beginning of the pilgrimage, though he will not break the fast he began four days prior to that. As with the _kahs-wan_ , he must be ritually pure and entirely mindful of the disciplines he has mastered, for he carries with him an artifact-- a treasure, almost-- few Vulcans are fortunate to bring back from their Ordeal. 

For three years, now, it has rested in an urn within the family ComuSafe, awaiting the appropriate occasion. Now that same vessel is tucked carefully in Spock's saddlebag, a reassuring ( _vindicating_ ) weight against his thigh. There is no shame, surely, when a scientist values proof, even if it is proof he may venture where many full-blooded Vulcans never go.

' ** _Tonight_** ,' he thinks, without excitement or trepidation, or any emphasis at all save the concrete nature of the fact. The goal. Such focus is permissible as a pivot for pain meditation, if not for potential accomplishment or gratification. Yet, deep within the dark, unplumbed depths of self, a trace of more naive desire persists. An echo of an echo. He learned swiftly enough, even in the scant early days his mother was permitted to hold him balanced on her hip, to hide the unanswered emanations of his outcast's soul. If only he could have been expelled from the womb knowing this subterfuge was necessary! Such would have saved him a great deal of trouble. It is an internal well, one he has had no choice save to seal over, though others still occasionally detect hints of its existence. And, like their desert ancestors in pursuit of actual water, his teachers hunt the metaphorical wellspring of Spock's difference

( _otherness_ ) 

relentlessly. He must be Vulcan, without and within. Thus, he views the two possible outcomes of this present journey with painfully constructed dispassion. If he should fail, he will be linked with T'Pring, or some other daughter of a noble house, should she surpass him and achieve her own victory in the Watcher's ritual. Only emerging from the desert with his prize has thus far spared him-- both of them-- the careful matching that is the safeguard against adulthood's whispered madness. If he succeeds… he dare not think it, dare not approach the word he holds within by even the faintest degree of association. He calls the ultimate treasure he seeks 'purpose' instead of 'happiness'.  
He is ten standard years of age.

 

They say his Vulcan blood is thin but, in this one rare instance, the other candidates-- the pure children of _T'Khasi_ \-- in the party are likely considering their potential future contentment, just the same as he. Spock calculated this probability (83.76%, error margin +/- .02) the moment they set out, having at last a sample size larger than only himself (omitted, to avoid skewing the data), T'Pring, and Solan. The three of them represent ShiKahr, emerging as they have not only from the _kahs-wan_ , but also with the highest scores in the various academic, psychological, and telepathic tests which mark the preadolescent phase of education. The past three years of their lives have been dedicated to ensuring they are worthy of being Chosen and well-equipped to face this final hurdle. Another from the capital, Sohvan, also scored quite high, but it was well known that he emerged from the desert empty handed, and so there way never any hope for him. The other nine children presently in the caravan constitute the remaining contribution for the entire planet. Twelve total, from a global population of two billion, tasked now with the last of those ancient rituals sanctified and re-imagined by Surak to ensure the survival of their species. The original reason for the ceremony, a thing of mingled mysticism and scientific awe, has not been lost or removed, as the great teacher knew it could not be. It is instead obscured, yet still set in the collective consciousness as firmly as the fever that bids their race return to the red sands at the appointed time. As immutably as the dark stone towards which the procession rides. 

The other candidates do not welcome his presence-- of that, Spock is certain beyond the need for calculation. A part of him, already a connoisseur of hypocrisies, a collector of instances in which action has not matched the strictures espoused and IDIC has been but a thin patina, catalogues this dispassionately. A greater portion of his being

( _stubbornly_ )

tenaciously proceeds and participates in the pantomime, pretending with the rest that the added scrutiny he is subjected to has a rational foundation. It was _logical_ to question the entire situation when he emerged from his _kahs-wan_ not merely alive, but Chosen. Sarek, a generation prior, had also been one such rarity, and never before had there been repeated selection so closely within a family line. The union of his parents was once more examined-- though carefully, to avoid any slight of honor against other couples bonded in the manner of the Watcher's ritual. Sarek and the Lady Amanda were the first Vulcan/Human joining to result from the ancient rite, but they were far from the first interspecies bonding. The Council was uncertain if Spock should participate, when the injection of genetic diversity which was partly the rituals purpose had surely already been satisfied with the inclusion of the Terran female. 

( _They-- and Spock is still young enough to relegate his elders to the classification of some untrustworthy and only half-understood phylum-- do all they can to avoid saying *her* name. Their pretense to fastidiousness is given lie by the linguistic acrobatics, the way they philosophically contort themselves around her very existence. They are like the primal Vulcans of old, who did not speak the name of the Death Goddess for fear of attracting her notice._ )

This controversy has mulled its dispassionate turmoil for the intervening two years since Spock emerged from the periphery of the Forge with his handful of priceless feldspar. The very existence of this rare find has reassured him-- in times he was low enough

( _weak enough_ )

to need reassurance-- and it will shortly foretell if he is to be part of something more, or if the assertion of his fellows that he is 

( _an anomaly, an error_ )

a singularity has been accurate all this time.

 

He is here now, though, even if his age-mates ride apart from him and he must occasionally restraint himself from looking back towards where his mother-- in concession to her human frailty-- is carried in a covered palanquin. A flick of his gaze towards the other candidates reveals a coterie of impassive faces no more emotive than stone, all eyes toward the horizon, all similar phials of sand safely harnessed in saddle-bags and seemingly ignored. Placidity, prosperity, peace: these are the fortunes a Vulcan may wish, for one another or for themselves. Sensible goals, free of whimsy, or the rapacious desire for impossibilities which once drove their kind. 'Happiness' is far too emotive a word. Yet perhaps the idea lingers, even in his full-blooded companions, for just this instance. Rendered safe because it is not spoken, or even directly thought of.  
And, in the interests of accuracy, there is one emotive word still frequently uttered in the modern tongue; one thing in which a Vulcan is permitted to take delight.  
_Taluhk nash-veh k'dular._ I cherish thee.

Whether he alone carries an illicit shard of hope, painful but dear as a golden needle over which skin has protectively regrown, Spock will never be certain. No one may truly know the mind of another without the deepest of melds and, besides, an experiment may sometimes be unintentionally altered by the very act of observation. The uncertainty which exists within a particle itself before any measurement is taken, the differing behaviors of light. There are also, he is quick to note, electrons which maintain their association even after separation. Quantum entanglement is a fundamental aspect of transporter physics-- the ability to draw the whole together from only a sundered part.

Before the sunrises tomorrow, the Watcher of Watchers will provide all the necessary evidence. The young pilgrims will know not only if there exists for them a bondmate of ultimate compatibility, but also the identity of that being.  
The perfect twin of their _katra_.

 

Illogically but inescapably, he sometimes suspects he may not have a katra at all. Spock fears, in those moments of greatest privacy, that he is beset only with a damning human soul.

* * * * * *

The deepest, most elemental secret of the Vulcan race is shrouded in myth and metaphor, concealed already within the larger and already taboo subject of Pon Farr. Despite this cultural prohibition and the natural reticence of their species, the most efficacious protection of this ultimate truth is also the most simplistic.  
Even if it were laid out-- bare, banal, and clearly stated-- for the entire Federation… no one would believe it.

Spock himself is struggling with the verity of the situation, now that the Watcher of Watchers stands before him in all its eldritch glory, outlined in the brief but fuming brilliance that is a Vulcan sunset. From base to pinnacle, smooth and unbroken, it draws the eye upward hundreds of storeys higher than any modern architect would dare to build. The Way brought their people back from the brink of extinction, banishing superstition with the blasting clarity of logic. No more would signs and auguries, flawed mortal interpretation of natural cosmic operation such as comets of solar flares, dictate bloodshed or the trajectory of personal destinies.  
Silent, patient as the grave of billions it symbolizes, the Watcher's smooth obsidian surface seems to wink with the last of the setting sun, as if to say,  
_'Except….'_

Poetic and completely irrelevant anthropomorphisms aside, Spock is having a difficult time focusing on the appropriate middle distance during this brief 'welcoming' ceremony, especially given the necessity of keeping his inner eyelids closed. Standing at loose parade rest while the Watcher's single guardian priestess administers to each candidate in turn, he knows it would be unseemly to stare, no matter the exotic nature of the anachronism, the setting, and all that must take place here. Moreover, he is aware of his mother's presence amongst the small audience behind him-- of how her step faltered, just once, as she descended from the covered palanquin, pale and shimmering as her body wasted water in vain attempt to alleviate the heat. The desert cools rapidly once the sun is set; it may be that she is chilled (solicitude for one's elders is hardly illogical), nor is he certain there is any water left in the single canteen she was permitted for the journey.  
They will not allow her to drink from the well here, though whether that is for her own safety of the sake of ritual 'purity', Spock cannot confidently say.

 

Discouraged from attending at all, the Lady Amanda has been pitting her will against that of the High Council practically from the moment her son came out of the desert and returned to her (entirely metaphorical) arms. The matter of his _kahs-wan_ had caused a great deal of turmoil in her, some of which was undoubtably justified given the perilous environment in which he would spend his ten lonely, weaponless days. It was a matter of concern even for fully Vulcan parents, though they ameliorated any inappropriate sentimental investment in the outcome and focused entirely on making sure their children were prepared. Though she never once protested against the rite of passage, Spock sensed her unique distress all the same, for she is rather like an Andorian _xi'ohsul_ , an instrument of unbreakable blown crystal which owes its enchanting tones to that same highly sensitive material. With these, whole symphonies have been composed for execution by a single performer, such is the response to the slightest touch or vibration. In this same way, he is attuned to the delicate shifts in her internal 'weather', though he very rarely understands them or their cause. 

His father's suggestion-- tantamount to an order-- that he be fully Vulcan naturally entails he must look on her disordered being with indifferent compassion, setting her aside with other infantile things. Spock cannot bring himself to do this, though he is unable-- perhaps incapable?-- of reaching out to her either. Instead he tries, without violating Tu-Surak, to provide for at least some of her nebulous and ephemeral needs. It is like having charge of a delicate, exotic, and ultimately unknown plant. No one has asked him to assume this responsibility, of course, and he knows for a fact she considers 'protector' one of her chief functions as a mother. In the eyes of society, the Lady Amanda's welfare is solely the concern of her bondmate, a fact reinforced by the complete legal impotence forced on her family after she was taken from Earth. If it were known that Spock has the temerity to question his father's care, let alone the extent of this doubt, it would be shocking indeed. Almost a Challenge. Spock himself recognizes its impudence and lack of evidentiary merit, yet the criticism remains. Even if only half-articulated within his own mind, it is still the first wedge between father and son.  
It will not be the last.

 

As the ancient cast-iridium ladle is passed down the line of initiates, each child struggling for impassivity with varying degrees of success, Spock remembers to be grateful for his mother's exclusion from the ritual-- in this instance. He has been warned that the single sip he is about to take from the tower's well will make his body ill for days hence, even given the low-level trance techniques he may use to hasten the purging of impurities. The ancient Vulcan crime, the Violation of all natural law, has poisoned everything in the heart of the Forge, no less fatal for the thousands of years since lapsed. He must taste of it-- and suffer the consequences-- to indicate his understanding, his acceptance of guilt and obligation to recompense even his far-flung generation has inherited. 

They will be gone from this place before sunrise. It is not safe to linger. If the pace and strict time table of the caravan's journey were not enough to communicate the peril, the spavined form of the priestess-adept illustrates the point more than sufficiently. Closure of his _tvi-bezhun-wein_ limits peripheral vision somewhat but, now that she has drawn closer, Spock can study her without turning his head. Her hand is perfectly steady as she proffers the vessel, but the strong bone and muscle are encased in flesh that is heavily blemished and prematurely limp. The preponderance of ritual platinum and tungsten plating in her vestments may help slow the more spurious effects of radiation, but the overall protection is negligible in the long term. Certainly, the geometric metalwork fails to draw the eye away from the garish sores which decorate her form. Her face, too, must be marked with the cost of her honored and exacting task, for it is obscured above the lips by a half-mask of jasper. Ornately carved and alarmingly precise in its mimicry of a true face, the faintly translucent stone still allows for disturbing vermillion shadows beneath its mildly russet surface. Such an impartial expression is the Vulcan ideal, but there can be no doubt she achieved the organic equivalent long before its carved facsimile became necessary. Even with the affectation, two large black sores are visible on cheek and jawbone-- the latter of which is open-- throwing the white discoloration of her hair into even more vivid contrast. She is young by his race's standards, not yet seventy, but Spock estimates she has less than five years of functionality remaining. No holy cleric vouchsafed to the Watcher of Watchers lasts more than a decade as steward.  
An illogical waste of life, some might say. Yet, in this one aspect of Vulcan culture, there is little logic to be found. 

The overall effect of this willing and sanctioned sacrifice is quite shocking. She seems the personification of their planet's seemingly endless bloody past-- its superstitions, bloodlust, and emotional psychosis. A deliberate insult to modern, post-Reform fastidiousness, both physical and mental, and Spock is not surprised to note within himself some traces of instinctive revulsion. Every aspect of this endeavor, from the moment T'Pau blessed them for their journey across the sands of old, has been carefully designed to stir and test the ancient drives. Stimuli to provoke response, response measured… to what end? Because his entire life has been a test in one manner or another, Spock does not concern himself overmuch with the question. He is, instead, obscurely reassured to find he is not the only one upon whom the subconscious cues and semiotics are exerting pressure. 

 

Beside him, T'Pring accepts her allotted swallow daintily, but her typical grace is marred by an obvious desire to avoid even the remote possibility of contact with any of the priestess' garb or person as the ladle is passed between them. Spock does better, tempo and motion measured to perfect indifference as the tang of well water slides over his tongue. In the high, milky polish of the mask, he can see a faint if distorted reflection of the onlookers. His mother stands directly behind him-- masked as well, though for an entirely different reason. Having only one set of lids to protect her eyes, the Lady Amanda wears a vizor of plasiglass, faintly blue in hue and semiopaque due to its anti-radiation lacquer. Its similarity to the priestess' raiment is glancing at best, but the juxtaposition still strikes him as distasteful and intense. In the next moment, he is able to dismiss the inward shudder. He has been aware of the disparate nature of his mother's lifespan since he began grasping simple language; she has stated repeatedly that she does not wish him to dwell on it, and she certainly would not want him to do so now. He suspects she is being used against him, though obviously without her knowledge.  
This is hardly a new consideration.

While not _Kolinahru_ , each successive servant of the Watcher must be naturally gifted in _kash-nohv_. Once selected at birth from the rota of Houses, each is further trained in the disciplines of the Adepts--that sole surviving fane of what was once a rigorous order of telepathic warrior-sages. Though thoroughly demilitarized, Adepts are still masters of the most subtle mental pressures, using intonation, semiotics, and even minute gestures to manipulate the vestigial emotions of other Vulcans. They are Vulcan's _de facto_ law enforcement, though they are rarely needed, and are planet-bound save for special dispensation from the Council. The Adepts make other species _intensely_ uncomfortable, and the ease with which they subtly dominate a discussion or even an auditorium filled with individuals less self-aware than they is astonishing. This reputation extends to the farthest reaches of the Alpha Quadrant, and they are part of the reason Vulcans are so revered-- and almost feared-- throughout the Federation. It is said on other worlds that Adepts can drive any sentient being mad if they so desire, without ever extending a physical touch or telepathic tendril. Not true, of course, but it is… illogical to waste time dismissing or dispelling the fanciful hyperboles of those largely uninterested in the truth.  
Useful, too, to let it stand. 

The priestess will work this minute attrition against Spock-- against all the children-- here, now. She has likely already commenced the subversion, and he cannot afford to be distracted by unreasoning, visceral instinct and symbolism.  
This, after all, is only the beginning of the trial.

 

As he was the last to drink, Spock will be the first to ender the aspirant's passage, with T'Pring directly behind him. Regardless of the probationary contract between their clans, his lower instinctual processes-- what humans might call his triune brain-- still identify her primarily as another strong psychic force, and therefore a threat. While he has been subconsciously regulating these ancient impulses since he could toddle, he remains alert to any unwanted stirrings of particular strength so they may be obviated through meditation and application of mind rules. He finds the thought of leaving his back to her less than optimal and, upon reflection, sees no flaw in the logic of this particular atavistic response. As yet unlinked due to their potential for a higher bond, Spock has never the less experienced brief mental contact with T'Pring. There is one sole matter in which they are in accord, and it is this: the Elders are most respectfully but egregiously in error as to their supposed compatibility.

Well he knows the potential outcome T'Pring finds most desirable in her journey to the Watcher. There is one already paramount in her thoughts-- a mate of _pudvel-tor_ \--who is considered the most favorable scenario, but anyone who is not Spock will do. He cannot fault her, given his own aversion to their suggested union. Unseemly, this reluctance to submit to the Clan's wishes; he has been chastised for it. House of Surak he may be, but he should be mindful of the 'disadvantages' any potential bondmate would be forced to tolerate in him. A flawed fire opal still has value, but no honest merchant would set a price that did not acknowledge the undesirable inclusions. What strikes him as anomalous and unreasonable is T'Pring's objection to his very presence on this trek. She has opined-- as loudly as is permissible-- that his qualification as Chosen devalues her own, that it stains the sanctity of the entire process. (Is this not too close to actual animosity? Have her teachers addressed this with her? He has been told such queries are unacceptable-- if he focuses on correcting the errors within his own being, he will be too busy to mind the faults of others.)

Thus, there may be a minute trace of personal pride in Spock's bearing as he meets the gaze of the Watcher's steward. Those eyes-- rummy, blighted by petechiae and premature cataracts-- are as passionless as the desert, mired voids behind both the mask she wears and the mask that is her face. She raises her entire arm, a single finger pointing as an insistent signpost towards the portal he must enter.

Her thoughts strike his mind with a blast of cold such as he has never physically known, blessedly brief but agonizing. It is a flash which freezes every iota of moisture in flesh, leaving it to crumble under the slightest pressure. 

_'Do you know fear? Granted that which is most precious, are you capable of honoring it-- of _protecting_ it, and accepting its protection in return?'_

"Fear is an impulse any rational being may, with appropriate effort, override," Spock says, aloud for the benefit of the onlookers. He is confident in the recitation, if not precisely in its execution, though he doubts the subtle waver of his voice carries further than his present judge. 

The youthful crone transmits broad acknowledgement along with the slightest of nods, but says nothing. He must answer the second question, however, and that has no formulaic response. Swiftly, but with utter certainty and veracity, he speaks. "'Parted from me, never parted'; I would sooner cleave through my own being than fail to shield my _telsu_."

He hardly recalls the inspiration that compelled these words, but the priestess must find them adequate, for one icy blade carves _PASS, THEN_ into his mind.

 

Having just espoused the ephemeral nature of fear in the face of logic, he must now face the narrow aperture and demonstrate. The adults have been ushered away towards the main entrance, at least eliminating the temptation to look back. The portal is barely larger than the lancet window favored in ancient fortresses, filled with darkness so absolute he must guide himself with both hands along the claustrophobic walls. While tall enough to accommodate an grown Vulcan, the width of the passageway does not even allow him to fully stretch out his arms. At first, the brickwork is smooth to the touch and the construction fairly prosaic, despite its ritual import. Gradually, however, the linear interlocking of stone gives way to what feels like an endlessly curving spiral, growing narrower all the while. T'Pring should also be in the tunnel by now, though there is no sound to indicate her presence. Is there anyone behind him at all? It comes to him suddenly that the absence of sound encompasses more than merely ambient noise; the silence is stifling, unnatural. He cannot even hear himself breathing. 

The passageway must circumnavigate the outer layers of the Watcher, for it has already gone on far too long and curved far too tightly to be accommodated any other way. The spacial relation of the design is fluid, almost _slippery_ , and at one point the darkness seems to perpetrate the illusion that the _walls_ are now beneath his feet. The curvature has become simultaneously extreme and like that of the planet, so minute as to imperceptible-- either that, or his state of disequilibrium has reached a point of interfering with proprioception. The contradiction is uncomfortable-- it makes his skin crawl. The surfaces are no longer uniform, degenerating from geometric order into surfaces embossed with irregular designs. Each step forward increases the complexity of these bas reliefs, which quickly become so elaborate his questing fingers can not longer assist in visualization. Then, increasing so subtly he does not at first quite register it, a marginal sort of illumination returns. Shapes begin to protrude from the stone, bathed in their own intrinsic phosphorescence. 

It is not _quite_ light, however. In optics, the 'color' black is the absence of light; yet here, Spock finds his eyes itching even beneath their protective inner lids as he struggles to see in what can only be described as an electric ebon/violet. The obstacles in his path are now clearly visible as sculptures, shapes portrayed as though frozen in the process of phasing through the walls. He narrowly avoids physically starting when he realizes these are heads. _Faces_. The visages are Vulcanoid, but they cannot possibly _be_ Vulcan. They are like caricatures, grotesquely contorted in emotional extremes surely none of his race would ever allow. The attitudes of fear and anguish, the degenerate rictus of battle-lust and anger, are surely beyond even what natural physiology would allow.  
It is _obscene_. 

Though his visual perception is now in a range just below that of natural twilight, Spock cannot avoid touching these effigies, which at once mock both the pride of his people and the very concept of 'art'. They thrust out from all angles, not merely heads but now also arms, hands, the occasional foot or leg. He must maneuver around them to make his way, ducking and shimmying, and one point crawling on his belly to get past them. Their raw mineral composition seems roughly analogous to a milky quartz, flecked with striations of gold which, in any other circumstance, would be fascinating to examine as a possible source of the phosphorescence. As it stands, Spock can only shudder as the life-sized figures grow progressively more disfigured and depraved. The pretense of light is as deceptive as spatial relation in this place, casting drifting shadows of disquieting almost-color. Here, the viridian of blood, the red of dunes, an offensive yellow that speaks somehow of fire burning in filth. The fingers are rendered to appear rotting as they reach out blindly, whole faces blighted, hard crystal bone piercing forth unnaturally from crystal flesh.

Utterly unwillingly, Spock thinks of the small, red-eyed totem so readily provided to Vulcan children. Not a gift or a bauble, but a tool given to assist the novice in meditation, customarily bequeathed as soon as the brain has developed the necessary areas for focus. The life-sized carved blasphemies he is presently faced with bear not the slightest resemblance to the innocuous aids of his early years, yet it seems now they are all-- each unwholesome figure-- shudderingly imbued in the lines he spent hours studying to center himself. The practice supposedly honors the Vulcan personification of curiosity and the search for knowledge, the graven images as old as meditation itself. His reaction now is so deep and involuntary that there can be only one conclusion: certain subtle, mnemonic visual cues must somehow have been worked into that standardized little idol, completely subliminal horrors rendered inert. As certain viruses may linger dormant in the body for years, so too have these impressions been implanted in the deepest part of the subconscious. 

It is dizzying to consider the deliberate, careful planning which must have gone into this… the only appropriate word Spock can think of is 'conspiracy'. Even then, he must use the Standard term, for no equivalent label for such large deceptive enterprise has survived from ancient Golic. The small statues are often called Little Watchers. The name is damningly apt, for **watch** they do, emissaries of those who instituted Vulcan's Reform, in the dim days when Surak's teachings could not be guaranteed to take hold. They reach out, insidious and seemingly mundane, to work their will unknown. Without consent. He is disconcerted-- almost repulsed-- to find these associations continue to work upon him despite his new awareness, activating a species wide-phobia and memory in the most automatic and reflexive mental functions. How many generations of Vulcan children have sat before their totems, seeking the serenity of logic, never suspecting the failsafe being implanted without their consent? It is like discovering explosive ordinance concealed in ones intestines. 

 

Suddenly, Spock feels very weak. The glucose in his veins seems to evaporate, his time sense vanishing as though it never existed at all. Lungs burning, he catches himself gnawing on the inside of his cheek so hard that blood bathes his tongue. It's as though he hasn't eaten in months instead of days. There is no room to turn around in the tunnel now, no way to turn back, though _something_ communicates very firmly and directly to his brain that retreat is still viable. He can give up, he can embrace the shame of failure rather than the horror he presently endures… the horror that is to come. He shrinks from the touch of this not-psyche, a presence that is as difficult to credit as it is utterly alien. It occurs to him briefly that it must be another illusion, a by-product of his disorientation, but he knows as soon as the thought forms that this cannot be. The presence is too far beyond the scope of his understanding, and he is certain he should wish to die on the spot if his mind were ever capable of conjuring anything as foreign and antithetical to life itself as _this_. Like the _le-matya_ which slew his only friend, this unknown entity has drawn up upon Spock with silent, impersonal violence-- yet even the most rabid animal would have more vigor and investment in its own existence. A hurtling, impartial engine of destruction, it implacably insists that, should he be sensible and flee, he will not encounter T'Pring or anyone else during his coward's marathon. They are all here together, the twelve child-initiates, and they are utterly alone. Two contradictory states at once. 

Spock's only company now is this cold observer, a sentience of such perfect self-awareness that it fights to avoid consciousness a sleeper resists ejection from the haven of oblivion. It resents the presence of organic things-- of Vulcans-- which it perceives both almost as an infestation and as a source of its own abstract selfhood. It did not ask to be created, hating the burden of absolute and unvarnished reality, wanting only to fulfill its purpose so it may return to its dreams. 

_('Nocturnal visions, controlled solely by the subconscious, are an ineffective method of integrating quotidian events.' It is an old drill, from early in Spock's schooling. 'Proper meditation is both more objective and efficient, deprecating this automatic function almost entirely…'_ )

//Ahh, but we all dreamed once, do you see? There are races that may dream yet, but we are banished. Take you pride in logic? It is our salvation and our penance. The Way is narrow, narrow, and you have trod its wicked edge yourself.// They are not words-- Spock could not bear it if they were-- but thought-shapes of the most abstract nature, the mime-language of a five dimensional being trying to pass a message to a rudimentary phenotype. A transmission which has no meaning to the sender and no memory associated with it, save long-ago programming which dictates it _must_ transmit. In the instant he questions-- **What IS this?** \-- the answer appears whole in his mind.

//We who are rational beings were once beasts-- then less than beasts because, in our hubris, we told ourselves we were the pinnacle of creation. That we owed nothing to each other, to the future or to the past. Stars bowed, electrons trembled; we summoned mockeries of life, built artificial minds and filled them to the brim with all things quantifiable. With knowledge, but knowledge does not wisdom make.//

Shuddering under this onslaught, Spock ceases moving entirely. The instinct to panic is overwhelming: epinephrine and norepinephrine flood past his stress modulators, hormones merge with neural activity to hold his body rigid and ready for flight. His eyes sting in that peculiar way of theirs, a symptom he has yet to find a satisfactory explanation for in any medical database he has access to. He suspects his eyes-- ah, by all the old gods, his _human_ eyes!-- are attempting to cry but lack complete tear ducts to accomplish this. The blood in his mouth is now dribbling down his chin, but he does not cry out. Every muscle in his form is focused simply on enduring from one moment to the next.

 

More thought-shapes: lurid, perverse. Images which are fundamentally _wrong_ , yet so vivid he can smell the urine of the elderly dying in the streets, the acrid scent of hair burning in funerary pyres the size of city blocks. Violations of men and women-- by one another, by weapons, by machines. Prowling steel forms-- at once alive and utterly inanimate-- trample infants beneath their feet; parents devour their first-born to prove fanatic loyalty; dull-eyed scientists concoct weapons of nucleotide and RNA, watching their victims disintegrate alive with a faint air of boredom. 

//We were made to crawl on our bellies through the filth and the ash. Evolution is not a straight line, but a wave. What rises too fast will inevitably fall.//

The scenes become static-laden as Spock's brain resists accepting them, for they are truly lunatic now. Before, he questioned the veracity of what he was being presented with as a form of self-protection. Now, he is wordlessly _informed_ that the next scenes never existed-- but they could. They _could_ because the abomination buried here is, in fact, that powerful. Capable of warping reality. He looks on stones bursting in the desert to spew forth birds already engaged in auto-cannibalism; lovers embrace about a two edged-sword that slices into each even as they rut relentlessly together; chittering _things_ dance amidst ruined, waste-strew cities and eat viscous fungi-flowers from the crumbling walls.  
It is not rational, _not logical_ , _not logical_...

 

// **PRECISELY**.//

In a flash of insight more intuitive than anything else, Spock grasps a portion of the lesson so ruthlessly outlined here. Logic is a soothing balm; safe, antiseptic, largely unconcerned with the future or the past. Static, stagnant. _Life_ sprang from the chaos of the universe, from a singularity prior to which no state may be imagined, and there will never be any logic in chaos. Infinite diversity in infinite combinations-- of amino acids and nucleotides, of alkali metals and noble gases, isotopes stable and otherwise. From Aldebaran shell-mouths to the Terran okapi, from slim Andorians to Klingons laden with muscle and ridges of keratin. Life may tend to evolve towards certain basic efficient formats, but there is an element of the Random which cannot be denied.  
The Way has saved the people of Vulcan, but at a price. 

Surak himself compared his teachings to a path, a clear delineation from which any offshoot or variance spells only ruin. Vulcans had known hatred, which is self-replicating. They turned to logic, which itself begets only more logic, each time more divorced from compassion. It is-- and Spock is so astonished to realize this that he actually gasps-- _affection_ (even in this extreme, he cannot quite think the word 'love'), connection that breeds the cultural mutation necessary for successful evolution in sentient beings. It can result in malfunctions, yes-- fear and hate and vengeance-- but it produces also creativity, art, intuition, faith. Irrational forgiveness, loyalty, the protectiveness of a parent who lays their life down for their child, of a lover who will suffer a thousand times over rather than allow their mate to endure half that. It unites opposites: his mother and father.

Alone in the pit, the very nadir of hope, Spock understands that the Watcher-- and all its attendant pairings and rituals-- is Surak's way of maintaining the one random element necessary to keep their people alive. Not just an assurance of existence, the continued preservation that logic dictates, but _life_ that changes and adapts and is not afraid of the struggle to survive. This cannot be achieved via unions of logic. Call it destiny, compatibility, a merging of minds-- these are simply labels for the mystery that is the quivering viscera of the universe. The chain of reasoning seems like a noose, for what good does such knowledge do him now? He can never be clean or whole if he is heir to even half the atrocities he's seen, even in the hundred thousandth generation. He told the priestess-adept he knew fear, but he did not.  
Not fear such as this, in the face of certain failure. Victory now would be impossible and, worse still, meaningless. 

 

_'You don't believe that, and neither do I.'_ It's such a rapid and unceremonious impression, utterly unexpected but perfectly timed. Not true articulate words, not even akin to the terrible thought-shapes which have been assaulting him, this 'voice' comes from _within_ Spock. But if is not _of_ him. To no longer be alone with the anomalous torturer is a gift, but Spock is so astonished by this beautiful incongruity now present that all else slips from his consideration. It is a bright thing, small and delicate as the most specialized cell, all gold and full of welcome, of decency and wonder to deny the hideous images he has been subjected to. Not a telepathic communication in the traditional sense, oh no. This is no melding of rational minds, for Spock has been deliberately driven as far from rationality as any post-Reform Vulcan can get. Nor is this new and actual being consciously aware of Spock. It may even be-- how astonishing!-- presently dreaming. He can tell only that it is not Vulcan, and not inherently possessed of psionic gifts. It need be none of these things, nothing other than its precious self, which the hybrid Vulcan now approaches with an adoration just short of religious awe. 

How has he lived in ignorance of this connection? It is like truly observing one's heart beat for the first time, something vital but unrecognized in the obliviousness of infancy. 

_'How did you **find** me?'_

_'I have always been here.'_

He does not know who asks and who answers. The facts, the sense of kinship, are the same regardless.

_'You almost make me believe in miracles.'_

_'I have been, and always shall be, your friend.'_

Friend… brother, lover.  
_**T'hy'la.**_

 

It is the word Spock has carried with him since the first moment he read it, a curious creature on unsteady legs whose fine motor control did not quite match the precision of his rapidly maturing mind. There had been a tome-- rare, not meant for young hands or young minds, but left out when his mother was called away from her work to answer an interstellar comm. Father is a scientist and a diplomat, but _she_ is a linguist. A lover, therefore, of words and intonation and vagaries of meaning. As Sarek's bondmate, she had an opportunity few outworlders could hope for, and her unerring instinct for the core of any culture she studied led her quickly enough to Vulcan's few examples of literature. While not precisely forbidden, the handful of novels which survived from the latter millennium of Tu-Surak (before logic crystalized entirely and fiction was abandoned altogether) are considered indecent for all but the most mentally and morally stalwart of readers. They mention customs, vestiges of lesser time, and dress parables as imagined narratives. One tells of female warriors who defied their clans, invoking _kal-if-fee_ that they might take up the Way. Another follows the exploits of two former mortal enemies whose near-fatal confrontation becomes instead an unexpected bonding of great mental compatibility and brotherhood. Struggle and connection-- a search for kinship away from one's kin. Sarek scolded his son and confiscated the book upon discovery (if he attempted to chastise his wife as well, it was not without vociferous rebuttal), but it was too late. Spock's mother was right in her frequent assertion: words have power. 

To name a thing is to help draw it up into reality, to create from the abyss of inchoate thought. A single word had hinted to Spock that his instinctive search was perhaps not an aberration or sign of weakness. _T'hy'la_ ; the touch now in his mind, a perfect aurulent grain of sand. The manner of its discovery reminds Spock of Terran oysters that form and conceal pearls. _'My consciousness was birthed entwined with this!'_ he thinks, and the only sound he makes in that abhorrent passageway is actually a laugh, because he has conceived an ornate metaphor and will not repent of it. His consciousness, the thing called 'Spock', was created to enfold this dear, impossible kernel, to hold it close. He curls around it the way he hunched over his meager fire during the cold nights of _kahs-wan_. This ember is so strong, and yet so vulnerable! He must shelter it, but he also cannot suffocate it. It will take a great deal of care to balance these impulses.

//As emotion must be balanced with logic.// The thought-shape is passionless, conveying something that had no direct meaning to the entity transmitting it. A dull, repetitive and involuntary motion, as the legs of a dead animal will sometimes kick when galvanized by electricity. Spock has no mind for the horror of this beyond keeping the repellant not-intelligence away from the bond he has discovered. His own survival at this point is incidental-- he must move forward, because he cannot leave this _k'hat'n'dlawa_ , this other self, alone.

 

All of these events transpire in what is only objectively a few moments, and only for nanoseconds does Spock truly experience the plurality of bonded consciousness, the most intimate and ultimately vulnerable connection possible between two beings. Ancient fragments of poetry refer to this as the I/we of psyches sundered at the beginning of time. It is a homecoming, the return of an element to its most stable isotope. Ironically, the union is too powerful to be maintained any longer than that, the constituent minds being too young and inexperienced to fully wield the potency of all they can accomplish together. This brief taste is too much, it will never be enough, but it is sufficient for the lesson and the transformation Surak intended the Watcher to impart. 

Entangled and aching, Spock and his bondmate are also one in intent and tenacity. They dislike defeat, never surrendering to anything completely, reluctantly pulling back when necessary and holding onto hidden pieces of themselves while pretending-- with varying degrees of success-- compliance to their elders and betters. The I/we of this bonding is rooted deeply in a stubborn determination to be…  
( _More than just another 'Fleet brat, more than a mind and drive withering away in the quagmire of small-town complacency and the affectionate absence of his duty-conscious parents. … Parent, singular, now that one has made 'ultimate sacrifice'-- the strange rite of 'never-coming-home-again'._ )  
( _More than an irregularity, a hybrid born of esoteric bonding practices and a knife's edge balance of cultures, a creature beset by half-named yearnings and the dubious evaluations of his peers._ )  
_**themselves**_.

_'This is not the hill we die on.'_  
Again, the impression is not truly one of words, and the foreign context/associations make even the notion behind it almost incomprehensible to Spock. He *feels* the meaning, though, knows he will have the strength to move forward even against the clinical hostility of the thing concealed within the Watcher's walls. 

 

Spock begins to push himself up from his abject sprawl, the very set and attitude of his form and musculature changing. Imbued in him is the purpose he longed for during the trek across the Forge, but also humility.  
It is fitting then that, in the brief moment he is on his knees, Spock cradles close the beloved he has discovered and allows his katra-- or his soul, it no longer matters which-- to howl its ecstasy and its triumph. 

 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary/Notes:  
> [+] _Tu-Surak_ \- the way of Surak.  
> [+] _tevun_ \- a Vulcan year.  
> [+] _dzharel_ \- a horse-like horned animal.  
> [+] _tvi-bezhun-wein_ \- the inner or nictating membrane covering the Vulcan eye to protect the eye from sun or sand.  
> [+] _pudvel-tor_ \- chosen, preference.
> 
> All definitions from the [Vulcan Language Dictionary](https://www.starbase-10.de/vld/). Feedback is logical, and used to keep the muse from chewing on the furniture. ;-) No sehlats were harmed in the making of this fic.


	2. The Name

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, thank all of you so much for all of the wonderful feedback! It was very inspiring. While perhaps not the longest single chapter of anything I've written, this is definitely up there. Hopefully that's a fairly good thing, and not a terrible one. I really couldn't find a good point to stop earlier along, and I didn't want to spend _another_ chapter at the tower. Though I don't share his talent, I definitely suffer from what Stephen King sometimes refers to as 'literary elephantiasis'. ^^'  
> *crosses fingers* Hopefully this chapter doesn't seem like a let-down or sudden skewing of the narrative.

With every tenant of telepathic discipline focused on keeping the golden spark protectively anchored in his mind, Spock is finally able to rise to his feet. The last of the grasping sculptures are behind him, but the passageway has narrowed so that he must employ a sideways motion to make any progress. Palms flat against the wall and almost up against his own chest, he finds himself still at times haunted by the notion that he is somehow crawling on his belly, moving perpendicular to the floor. The eldritch black-glow is also fading as the masonry returns to more prosaic ebon stone, but the darkness is fair trade enough to escape the sepulchral representations of ancestors whose sins he has now experienced so vividly. The brilliance within-- growing stronger now, a tiny sun that could fit on the tip of his own child's finger-- is enough. It banishes the nauseating spacial and temporal distortions so that, when the way becomes concave and returns to the traditional definition of a tunnel, Spock trusts that sensory input is genuine. Locomotion is temporarily impaired by the increasing upwards angle, but there are impressions

( _how many hands have worn away the stone, grasping from beneath the Watcher's cairn, not fully grown themselves but heaving their still-frightened forms from civilization's grave?_ )

in the bedrock which make serviceable footholds. In the end the distance is shorter than he anticipated but, as he can feel the profound disarrangement of his time-sense settling back to near optimal norms, he becomes more concerned with discrepancy between objective and subjective experience. It seems impossible that the entire harrowing experience lasted less than 30 minums, yet the return of his mental equilibrium suggests just that. It is obvious that the entire ordeal was orchestrated by some artificial means-- perhaps some combination of external influence and pharmaceutical intervention concealed in the well-water? Yet Spock has been tested rigorously in all basic physiological controls; he is able to consciously regulate blood-pressure, heart-rate, digestive function, and can easily identify-- and, to some extent, manipulate-- chemical and/or hormonal levels in his body, as well as ninety-two percent of all substances he could potentially be exposed to. Owing to its historical application as a weapon, poison is one of the first foreign substances children are taught to recognize and-- insofar as is biochemically possible-- ameliorate with mental discipline. Only the final level of _enok-ka-fi_ remains for Spock to master, an accomplishment which is not expected until he is past his sixteenth year. Furthermore, he knows of no technology which could project to or interfere with his telepathy so completely. 

 

Innate scientific curiosity aside, it is a mystery Spock has little mind for at present. All must pale and shrink from the new fire he carries, a thing of twisting starlight and inviting warmth. Something perceived in so contradictory a manner ought to be offensive, a burden to his well-ordered mind, but it is quite the opposite. Just as objects are held in their swirling orbits by certain fundamental forces, so too is the sense of this precious 'other' now the pivot on which Spock's awareness turns. In the years to come, he will never truly grasp or recall the entirety of the sensory history the Watcher exposed him to. It will take many cycles of meditation to organize the experience, denuding the images of as much of their intrinsic terror as possible so that they may be integrated into his overall psyche. A part of him will always shy away from the memory, however, just as his people stalwartly maintain and ignore their avoidance of the central Forge. 

Rounding a final disquieting curve suddenly reveals an opening ahead, dimly and irregularly lit, just large enough for Spock to push himself through. Heaving himself out, he discerns his new surroundings to be a brazier-lit vestibule not dissimilar from other temple or library structures, though carved still from the disquieting black andoscite. Given his recent travels, the stone hardly registers as aesthetically abrasive now. In another minimal incongruity, there are elements in the room suggestive of a workshop; a stone slab with presently unidentified metal implements and what appear to be heavy iron casting molds, as well as a ledge along which the candidates' various phials of feldspar have been arranged. The notion that someone else has touched his prize is hardly palatable, but he understands intuitively now what he grasped only factually before. While the sand is important, at least as an indicator of sorts, is it only a conduit. The true treasure has always lain cradled within his very being, awaiting only the awakening of their connection. 

Rising to his feet, Spock absently dusts off his silk tunic and trousers. The rich fabric-- done in the primarily in matrimonial silver with blue accents to indicate the House of Surak-- is largely unsullied, another indicator that the trial he has just endured was not an entirely physical experience. He notes with absent distaste that the exit through which he just crawled is framed by statuary not dissimilar from that of the passage. A pair of bare legs, one on either side of the aperture, joined in the facsimile of a female vulva at the actual point of egress. Bas reliefs of skulls spill out from beneath the headless pelvis, designs fading into orderly, _decent_ geometry as though the influence of all they represent is slowly and visibly dissipating the further one moves into the room. What once would have shocked his sensibilities, however, now only strikes Spock as an overwrought metaphor. Birth from death, yes-- affections clandestinely permitted to grow without running riot over society. The lesson of the passage was extremely visceral, and so hardly needs reinforcement by such decadent ornamentation. 

Another glance at the phials reveals that the even dozen has been reduced now to only ten. It seems Spock is no longer merely a candidate-- he and nine others have passed through the ritual to become Chosen. Did the other two flee, as the force in the passage so insidiously urged; had their bond been insufficient, or were they merely incapable of learning ( _enduring_ ) the requisite lesson? None of the children were informed in advance that such complete failure was even a possibility, and it suddenly occurs to Spock that he has never before undergone a test for which he was not given the opportunity to study. Even his _kahs-wan_ involved months of training and preparation, though all faced the desert alone in the end. He finds he does not much appreciate being evaluated via methods so reliant on manipulation and subterfuge. While some level of artifice is difficult to avoid in trial scenarios, surely this level of deception and outside interference in end results is almost…

_'Like cheating?'_ Again, the thought is not his-- and not even precisely a thought at all-- merely a sympathetic echo from that shard of the One he carries inside himself. As the surface tension of water responds to a ripple, as vibration carries along a plucked string, even those places where the chords of their personalities are not aligned still resonate along the same frequency. His _t'hy'la_ has a strong sense of justice seasoned with an understanding of subjectivity. _'I'll play any game they want for as long as they want, but I don't always have to play by their rules.'_

 

Spock raises an eyebrow in secret agreement with his bondmate's insight, so fractionally that only his mother would likely be able to read the stubbornness hiding therein. There is a scuffling behind him, and he turns in time to watch T'Pring lever herself out of the claustrophobic tunnel, silk dress and slippers causing her to slide away from the carved legs into a heap on the mosaic floor. It is the most undignified he has ever seen her-- and the most displeased, though the latter isn't saying much. The lapse is mastered almost before her expression even settles, her visage returning to the general placidity which-- Spock has been assured-- could only be interpreted as arrogance if one is beset with preconceived notions. 

_('Hardly that', Spock overheard his mother whisper tightly once, protesting the possible union. 'She simply has the aura of the perpetually displeased.')_

Rising swiftly to her feet, T'Pring comes to stand beside him-- an arm's length away, but still closer than she has ever willingly endured before. A beat later, Selvuk appears, followed by T'Panga, Sondark, T'Cheun, and Shenduk. Another short interval, and the final three more tumble forth-- two reticent females from the far north and a male from the equatorial canyons. All are discommoded, some clearly still processing or puzzling through either the experience itself or the mechanism behind it. Others betray a certain inwardness with their flat gazes that Spock will come to associate with focus on one's _tel_. Each works quickly to regain mastery of their bearings and expressions. Upon later review of the events, he will experience a small stab of pride at continuing to meet or excel the standards of full Vulcans, but it will be very slight and almost hollow. By no means erasing his years as an outsider, the new awareness of his t'hy'la nevertheless blunts the immediacy of having been so ostracized, both consciously and unconsciously, by his teachers and his peers. Spock is a unique phenomenon, the first of his kind-- there is no getting around that-- but he has just confirmed himself as a singularity with a _purpose_. Not an aberration, but a creature twinned to seek union with its other self; a specialized cell designed to protect its partner and chosen to carry certain knowledge down through the ages while simultaneously ensuring that his people do not stagnate. 

"You have seen the shame of our past," the priestess adept intones, stepping from a shadowed alcove no doubt designed with the same operatic emphasis as the tunnel's womb-exit. None of these dramatic trappings are particularly compelling to Spock or his fellows now, but the sudden sound of modern Vulcan speech is jarring. To hear a voice properly uninfected by emotion, even and polished by informative purpose, seems momentarily discordant after the ululating cacophony of their ancestors. 

 

"We who are such rational beings were once beasts," she continues, an unpleasant repetition of that lesson which-- being an aged and automated transmission of some sort-- has clearly already been repeating for centuries. "When first we rose from the primitive state we quickly became haughty. Lust, pride, the conquerer's appetite-- these infected even the noblest of disciplines, poisoning the results and any innovation that followed."

The ten remaining initiates stare at her in horrified fascination, clearly making an attempt to school their expressions and just as obviously falling short. Somehow, they understand that they will not be judged or chastised for this-- at least by anyone save themselves. As with the strange fugue-odyssey in the passage, the rules of prosaic life have been temporarily suspended. Or (and perhaps Spock is the only one truly equipped to understand this) are being applied with unusual selectiveness. It is not so much that the narrative they are being presented with is new, for all Vulcan children learn the cautionary tale of their fore-bearers at the same time they begin studying basic mathematics. Their recent experience-- the light of context-- renders the once two-dimensional abstraction of fact as something far more vivid. Visceral. The details make it immediate, an inheritance to be endured rather than a distant past to view with undisguised superiority. 

"At this peak of so-called modernity, our ancestors pushed the boundaries of invention, mingling the artificial and the organic, toying with the fundamentals of life and consciousness. We created something we did not, could not, understand." This, too, could be extrapolated from existing data and their personal encounters, but Spock still finds it discomforting to hear the truth so baldly and explicitly stated. A fact obvious yet unspeakable. None here need be sworn to silence, since no knowledge or conviction will ever be enough to sway the consensus reality of their society as a whole. The secrecy surrounding the Watcher of Watchers has always been somewhat suspect by the very fact it goes so largely unquestioned. There is an imperative here greater than mere filial piety or socio-historical justification for ritual, more compelling than respect for one's ancestors or the shadow-play lessons of the past. 

This blind adherence has not gone completely unremarked upon; more conservative and literal proponents of Tu'Surak have requested permission to examine the Watcher scientifically. This, they argue, is in keeping with the logical dictums of open inquiry. In direct opposition to freedom of petition is the Council's continued firm denial, handed down half a dozen times in a dozen centuries, with no elaboration on the reasoning behind the injunction. Peripheral scholarly commentary has cited the logic of preservation-- the archeologist's argument that investigation ends where possible damage to the artifact begins. It is true also that the High Council-- indeed, every aspect of Vulcan's spartan legal system-- is not well-disposed towards writing new laws or, worse, overturning old ones. What was logical five, two centuries ago ought to be just as logical at present and, exempting changes in technology and the imported perversions of less rational beings, the same should be sufficient for centuries to come. From the position of one unwillingly enlightened, Spock finds it no small wonder that Surak encouraged the survival and cultivation of willful silence surrounding the region.  
Which would be worse: the unveiling of an ancient and inherently destructive technology, or the realization that-- even after thousands of years of dedication to rationality and banishment of mystery-- they _still_ do not and can not understand what the Watcher conceals?

 

"Your reasoning is most sound, Spock, son of Sarek." The boy in question starts a little, though only inwardly, eyes narrowing a fraction of a fraction. He did not feel the priestess' touch, which confirms another rumor-disguised-as-hypothesis: _Kashkau_ Adepts can, in fact, read the minds of other Vulcans without leaving a trace or indication. 

The woman addresses the others, seeming with each passing moment to be more the automata other races accuse their species of being; "What, then, is the reaction of the underdeveloped ego to something it cannot combat or understand?"

Consternation from her audience. They were not trained to respond beyond the ritual questioning, nor were they told to expect any rigorous line of inquiry, but they have been asked a very simple and direct question. It is very rare for Vulcan children to glance at one another during lessons, as they are not supposed to look to their peers for reassurance or clues. The truth is the truth, popular or no. The ten candidates violate this custom now, sharing a look that includes Spock. That is also highly irregular, to the point it might only recently have stirred the suspicion he learned long ago for self-preservation, but they are all so adrift there is no room to dissemble or deceive. Even the quality of T'Pring's gaze has changed, almost imperceptibly, and it is then he realizes that-- though they may never seek one another's company or come to an accord-- he and these nine others are now bound by an experience only other Chosen can understand. 

"Superstition," Sondark offers at last.

"Worship," T'Pring remarks, intent on clarifying the previous point. 

"Correct," the priestess says tonelessly. "This, then, is all the remains of what they would have made their godhead. Our ancient, advanced ancestors would have handed themselves over to _its_ logic, letting their own-- which was already woeful, despite their erudition-- atrophy completely." 

 

It's an unwholesome notion, and there can no longer be any question as to why or how those highly technological Vulcans of yore thrust themselves so deeply into the dark age that birthed the more recent millennia of warlords and violence. It is as if they reached a point where the knowledge catalogued had become unbearable-- or, more heretical still, meaningless. Unable to reconcile themselves with this new, merciless reality, what option was there? 'To run mad!' whispers that part of Spock which carries those same sins, however diluted-- the subconscious fears and repressed anxieties of an entire species. He has never been so grateful for his dual heritage, though it is not an absolution, for there is no absolution to be had. If the role of witness in the ritual was intended to plant a seed of doubt, however, then in Spock it may find soil to encourage new adaptations. He cannot be the only one amongst the most recent observers to wonder why this awful creation, whatever _it_ is, has been permitted to continue its existence. 

"It cannot die," comes the answer, sounding itself like the monotone dirges permitted only when irreparable harm is done to a katric ark. And then, more obscurely, "It is not conscious in the way we understand such things."

" _Dom nam-tor vohris nem-tor ha'kiv_ ," Selvuk recites. 'Then be slow to take a life'-- one of Surak's earliest aphorisms. And then, with a little less certainty, he adds, "The Great Teacher, then, set these rituals in place to protect us and remind us. He…" The others watch their comrade carefully and, while he does not wilt under their scrutiny, it is clear he is struggling to articulate what they've seen and experienced. "… wished us to prove our mental fortitude, to be worthy of our mates."

No questioning inflection at the end of that statement yet it seems, at least to Spock, that there should be. He can see now the delicate machinations-- physical, telepathic, mental, and even emotional-- which provoked in each of them a trauma which served as catalyst. At their most terrified and isolated, each of the successful Chosen reached within to find that place where, never and always touching, it was _impossible_ to be alone. The juxtaposition of priceless gift and unspeakable revelation is faintly discordant, however. Like the taboo surrounding the Watcher itself, the patina of logic seems incredibly thin in places. 

"You are, to some degree, in error," the Watcher's servant informs Selvuk, just as cooly as she affirmed the answers of Sondark and T'Pring. "Our teacher did, indeed, set forth these liturgies, legends, and conventions to remind a chosen few of our error-- for a crime cannot be avoided if the possibility of commission is not known. He wished to ensure the fruit of our sin remained undisturbed."

Spock's thoughts fasten on this with an uncanny haste, finding the flaw at once. He has been accused in the past of disguising his ('obviously human') difficulty in completely complying with Tu'Surak by critiquing that which he does not yet fully understand, for there have already been many questions his teachers-- and his father-- have found impertinent. He therefore does not vocalize his argument and, if he thinks it loudly enough for the adept to hear him, she gives no sign.  
He recalls the reluctance of the entity when he first encountered it, the texture of resentment all the more profound because it could never be a real, organic emotion. ' _But we did disturb it. We woke it from its sleep._ '

"Yet it," here her intonation goes not fully conceal her distaste for the being/thing of which she speaks, "continues to function in the one capacity it allotted to it. The T'hy'la of Surak asked for a boon, and it was granted."

 

Another shared look amongst the newly Chosen, this one further damning because it communicates also a faint hint of the scandalized. They cannot help it. Surak's regard for his bondmate is a matter of historical record; during their youth they were both known to have been skilled swordsmen and fierce psionic warriors, almost fanatical in their devotion to and defense of one another. Their _tel_ is still held as one of the purest examples-- perhaps even the epitome-- of _t'hy'la_ , in a tradition that stems from the depths of prehistory. (The *first* prehistory, Spock annotates privately.) 

A few poems by this warrior-sage have been preserved, as well as (with that extreme assiduity particular to Vulcan ancestral records) his family lineage. Beyond the tribe and tent-city of his birth, however, biographical data is almost nonexistent. He is mentioned only in connection to the Great Teacher, and even then there is no information on his particular contributions, personal or philosophical, to the Reform; no indication of when or how he met his demise. Even in those rare instances of his depiction by artists-- always centuries later, never without his bondmate-- his face is never shown. Spock always thought-- realizes he was let to believe via implication-- that this motif was intended to highlight the profound originality of Surak, whose plea for peace and logic alone had the power to divide history into Before and After. Now, the historical liminality to which this partner has been

( _Banished?_  
_No, no-- be silent. The evidence is insufficient._ )

relegated strikes Spock afresh with its strangeness. Occasionally, he is referred to as 'the consort' (though in truth that title rightfully belongs to the female who bore Surak's offspring in his later years), though Vulcan society goes to great lengths to avoid mentioning him in any context other than that of _t'hy'la_.  
His name is not known.

 

"For this purpose," their erstwhile instructor persists, as though she has not just committed an act almost as shocking as openly mentioning _pon farr_ , "and this purpose alone, does the _thing_ persist. We call it the Breach." She gestures towards the vessels in their neat array, bracelets flashing in the dim light. "You have already found the anchor of your bondmate within. Should you have encountered them prior to this, still you would have known them-- however imperfectly-- for who they are. Therefore, 47.25% of what remains to be done here is ritual." Distantly, Spock wonders by what method she arrived at this formula. 

He is beginning to understand that quantifying matters, even when such a thing is possible, does not automatically make a situation more rational. A discomforting notion, indeed. As is the recognition, for the first time in his life, that knowledge can be a burden. How misleading, the logical pursuit of understanding every aspect of the universe around one; the hoarding, memorization, and rote compartmentalization of raw facts. The image of a bridge hanging incomplete, trailing to nothing before it has crossed a chasm, hovers in his mind's eye, along with a numbing sort of mist at the edges of his cogitation, keeping something at bay. It cannot be be made to wait forever, though-- like the sickness promised by trespass on this very soured ground, it will take its toll soon enough. Some of the delay is sheer self-protection, for even Vulcans have limits when processing experiences in real-time. He has been taught to focus on whatever he is presented with, only now there is something sufficiently fascinating to sway him from the blinders he has been trained to place upon himself.

 

His bondmate is shield and shielded; a protection against the very horrific revelations from which Spock in turn must spare this precious other. Enthralling, this white hole which has birthed new matter into his own being… so intimately familiar, so exotic and utterly unknown. Spock's _telsu_ is male and recognizes Standard as mother-tongue-- that much is clear from their brief but very direct communion in the tunnel. Even a moment's peace for review grants the luxury of extrapolation: the other's age is not radically in variance to Spock's own, his family is connected with Star Fleet, and he is grieving the loss of a familial bond as much as any Vulcan might in the privacy of their own mind. Perhaps more so, given that psi-null species can never fully know or connect with one another through the sole medium of speech. Dynamic and adroit through it may be, it is clear that the mind of his bonded is not predisposed to telepathy. Even two hours ago, Spock knows he would have been obliged to master unwanted stirrings of learned shame at finding himself paired with an alien, perhaps thinking his own 'flaws and disadvantages' where being matched and highlighted. 

How distant such concerns seem now! His mother might have been the first Terran bonded in the manner of the Chosen, but she was hardly the first off-worlder to be taken as _telsu_ since Vulcan once more reached the stars. It matters not in the slightest to Spock now if his mate is Andorian, Denebolan, Cardassian, human, or anything in between. Let him be completely without precedent-- Spock will have no other save _this_ being, whose psychic presence is like a finger-print behind his most vital organs, perfect in all its flaws and strengths. 

It is true that Spock knows none of the quotidian particulars so many cultures emphasize as proof of intimacy, or even of acquaintance. There will be time for that, however-- the _appointed_ time, with all the solemnity and hidden joy owed to do it honor. The method has not been revealed  
( _too much has been revealed_ )  
by which he will further identify his t'hy'la, but he is familiar enough with his parents' history and with Federation by-laws to know it will come. The phial has not yet been utilized, and it has been promised that he will leave this place not only with the knowledge of his Beloved's existence, but with a _name_.

 

"Let us then bring matters to a close," the priestess-adept says, voice becoming perhaps a bit more strident, aware of her audience's wandering attention, of the unique glory each sees which now overshadows her own macabre presence. She ought, perhaps, to seem a bit tawdry now-- overly-theatrical, like the womb-exit of the tunnel and the other accoutrements of the esoteric which grace the Watcher's hidden passages. Regardless, she retains her gravitas; the unforgiving weight of her sacrifice and the brevity of her life. Her eyes (perhaps once blue, behind the accumulation of protein) linger with stark evaluation as she surveys each of her temporary charges. 

The arctic whip of her psyche is still fresh in Spock's mind, so sharp-- and why not? Though her short existence limits the number of pilgrimages she must oversee, still she is obligated to watch-- again and again-- as those already gifted with youth and vitality are further blessed then a thousand-fold over with the pinnacle of Vulcan  
_(desire, _desire_-- no antiseptic exemplar of scientific vocabulary can hide _this_!)_  
achievement. _K'hat'n'dlawa_.  
This she bears telepathic witness to, but will never know herself. Is resentment logical? No. But an observation of inequities is only a statement of fact. 

"You have been called 'Chosen'," she continues, a passionless sort of irony creeping into her tone. "Now you come to a point of choice." 

As one, the initiates startle, though they are thereafter too embarrassed to exchange glances no matter how much they may wish to confirm where this thought leads. Astonishing, how obvious the assessment is once spoken aloud, but it seems only articulation has made it clear to Spock-- and, doubtless, his compatriots-- to realize what little free will he has been allowed to exercise in this whole affair. He came upon the little crevasse filled with feldspar sand whilst I-Chaya's blood was still wet on his tunic. From the moment he returned from the desert with his life, his prize, and his understanding of a loss no one else would acknowledge, the process of ritual and bureaucracy-- so disconcertingly similar at times!-- has borne him along like puffs of _waneti_ see in the high summer winds. 

It may be argued that he made a choice in the passage, to press on when the Thing-Called-The-Breach demanded he retreat, but Spock does not see it that way, even faced with proof that others did indeed abandon their quest. Having touched the brilliance of his _ashayam_ 's mind, how could he turn from it? He is no more capable of deliberately harming or sacrificing his mate than a le-matya is of sprouting wings. He is not _built_ that way. _'Buk'_ \-- fate -- is considered an outmoded concept, abandoned in favor of universal constants and certain immutable results of cause-and-effect, but a limitation of vocabulary changes nothing. 

"Know you now that one awaits thee," the voice dips into a liturgical drone, more reverently lapsing into Old High Golic. "A part of thee which, while parted, maintains its connection still. The fires of _pon farr_ are but a formality for thee-- already, thy _teslu_ touches thee, even without a single touch. Thou are free to leave this place and seek thy bondmate in the wide universe."

 

What flutters in Spock's innards, beating like membraneous aphotic wings, is not precisely fear. There is deep trepidation, yes, but also the cynicism which has metastasized so profoundly since he entered the tower, affront, and a grasping sensation that overshadows all else. He has been promised more, if not explicitly then in everyday implied by the those Chosen and bonded before him. His mate is to be identified, summoned, brought to Vulcan in the cases of those outside their race.Even a planet of two billion presents odds and obstacles insurmountable without a more precise search method. An uncaring universe, free of both luck and capricious, miracle-dispensing gods has always been presented to him as a reassuringly logical concept-- now, it is just the opposite. It is more a churning sea of wild, unreasoning beings, even in the beacon of civilization that is the Federation. _Kaiidth_ , they are taught; what is, _is_. But no, no! Instinct itself rails against this. The thought that chance, that random operation of circumstance, might hold such sway over the search for his bondmate causes Spock's throat to tighten, his lungs to somehow shrink in their capacity to store or draw in air. 

"Or," the priestess remarks after a pause, switching away from archaic catechism, "You may leave this place with their name and _your_ confidence that you will soon need only reach out your hand to confirm their existence as fact." 

Seemingly fascicle, that image, but so powerful. Spock knows he is being subtly led by her intonation and word choice but-- though he resents her adept's interference-- he does not resist. The thought of reaching out the first two fingers of his hand, making an offering of the _ozh'esta_ to his t'hy'la, knowing it will be accepted…

"What, then, must we do?" There is a faint but imperious edge of demand in T'Pring's question and, while the words are spoken softly, it seems to echo in the chamber like a palimpsest of sound. A ripple of tightly controlled yet discernible surprise passes through the assembled children. Not at the inquiry-- they were doubtless all thinking the same thing, as was Spock-- but at some implication hiding in the very act of asking. Requesting detail seems almost an indication of complicity even before the act itself. Even T'Pring appears somewhat taken aback by her own temerity, though the tension shows only in her shoulders and not on her face. It is like the moment the speed of starship exceeds the gravitational pull of its launch point; a sense of being set adrift, letting the new and often unpredictable variables of space have reign. 

The uneven light of the vestibule glints on the adept's fine jasper mask as she tips her face towards the ceiling. Not an incongruous pose for a priestess, though it also encourages an optical illusion which reminds Spock starkly of the images so recently transmitted into his brain. The great undulations of dunes melted instantly to glass, spilled blood left to dry in such thick profusion that it was no longer a natural emerald but a sort of rotten brown lacquer. Purposeful, no doubt; another _kashkau_ trick, meant to keep the situation fluid, uncomfortable, and therefore unpredictable. Yet she radiates also a vague texture of satisfied judgement which Spock cannot define. However faint, it hardly seems becoming on any Vulcan, let alone a disciple of the sole surviving psionic school. It is at once utterly balanced and _too sane_. Years later, Spock will label it 'cold amusement' simply to have done with contemplating it at all. 

The steward answers, all proper composure and even inflection: "Petition the Breach."

Once spoken, it is clear this is the only possible answer, though it is not something Spock could have conceived of even moments before. As with the first time he grasped the pattern for determining primorial primes, the comprehension is so clear-- and afterwards, so innate-- that it cannot be unseen. Inescapable, her pronouncement; sooner could one unlearn how to read, forget the mechanism of speech. 

 

For a few heartbeats, the brunt of Spock's personal reaction is held at bay by an admiration for the sheer deadly and simplistic beauty of the trap in which they have found themselves. He is skilled at many games of strategy; including the ancient Vulcan 'Siege Canals' where, in one of those atavisms so studiously ignored, each player's aim is to cut off the other's access to the spiderweb of 'waterways' gauged into the nacre board. He is also already a Candidate Master under the Federation Conclave of Tri-Dimensional Chess, but it is the more traditional version of the game that comes to mind now. The wholly human version, taught to him by his mother. While far from mediocre herself, Spock has long surpassed the Lady Amanda, yet still they play from time to time. Her set is a whimsical one; figures of milky quartz and red sunstone cunningly but also imaginatively carved. The queens are faithful representations enough, though they sit atop prodigious toadstools, but the kings are frogs in royal array, and all the bishops are wolves. When he inquired about the latter, his mother said it was because they moved diagonally and liked to corner their pray.  
Just so.

Spock-- and, indeed, each of his comrades-- has just been castled. Now the revulsion comes, like coal-fire in the blood. It permeates the room, a sense of recoil and betrayal. 'Caught between a rock and a hard place', as his mother would say. As one, the Chosen project an instinctual negation which is, at the same time, very close to capitulation. The reaction _is_ polluted with emotion, but the bulk of it is automatic and natural disgust towards any contact with the Breach. With anything so antithetical to life itself. 

At the same time, the steward's instructions must be acknowledged not only as inescapable, but as completely rational-- the same blind and utterly ruthless logic by which certain desert creatures naturally consume their own young when conditions are unfavorable for large-group survival. Spock, however, questions the trap even as he writhes within it. He has been led by the hand, the connection to his t'hy'la awakened and now held hostage to a proposition that flouts every principle of Tu'Surak. A thousand scholars could each write a thousand monographs without being able to articulate exactly how this _is_ a violation, but it is undeniably true. In another first, Spock begins to understand why humans occasionally insist that guidance may be received from one's gastrointestinal system. He just _knows_ this is wrong, in his quivering viscera.  
Just as he is certain everyone present will make the same 'choice'. 

A void of despair greater than space itself clouds-- but, ah, cannot quite eclipse!-- his joy at finding his bondmate, but it is accompanied too by a brutal and unrepentant pride. _'I would do this,'_ Spock thinks, addressing-- confessing-- only to that web of deliquescent gold within. _'This, and far worse, for thee.'_ He does not blame or resent 't'hy'la for this-- such would be illogical as well as impossible-- for the capacity exists within Spock himself. The devastating strength and danger of Vulcan devotion. 

 

This time-- nor at any other point hereafter-- there is no shared look amongst the initiates. They are too ashamed, too wounded; too absorbed in trying to assimilate this new and unwanted self-awareness to risk seeing the struggle mirrored in those around them.

"Be you mindful, then," says the now implacable task-master, apparently feeling no need to inquire after their individual intentions. Vulcan speech is rooted firmly in economy and, besides, they have come too far to balk now, "of the choices you make here. Of what you are capable of."

_'Of the price paid,'_ Spock corrects inwardly. Though he would pay it a thousand times over-- and gladly-- for this t'hy'la, still he takes issue with her lack of precision. Paid, extracted. While it is doubtless a lesson the other children are just discovering, Spock's schoolmates have already taught him the unpleasantness of-- and his distaste for-- being cornered. 

Apparently finding her own words sufficiently damning, the priestess says no more, only motioning to the last who exited the passage. The order, it seems, is to be reversed. Spock wonders idly-- in a state of what many other species would likely call 'shock'-- which is preferable: to move forward without time to prepare or contemplate, or to suffer greater understanding of the act even as one has time to steel oneself for it. 

"Take you, then," the steward's voice is becoming raspy around the edges, another illustration of her isolation and ill health. "What you found in the desert, and smelt out the final piece." A prematurely gnarled finger crooks in the direction of the male from the equatorial regions, whose verdant flush of shame and excitement, hover swiftly willed away, is not quite hidden beneath skin blasted darker by the canyon suns. He follows her to the workbench, while those left to wait take an involuntary step closer-- one, and only one. The air is thick with an anticipation no one dares betray in posture or expression. They are presently as blank as any master of Gol might wish, yet the emanations of their psyches-- so newly awakened to dear ones half-unknown-- seem to coalesce into an additional entity, an indistinct phantom hovering impatiently over these last proceedings. 

They all _yearn_ , each and every one of them, as an active verb and, for the first time in his life, Spock understands the word 'avarice'. He cannot recall every wanting much at all in his life; the impulse towards preference is trained out of-- or perhaps rather _repressed_ \-- early on Vulcan. Aside from a few infants memories-- wanting to hold a shiny object meant for adults or a piece of fruit when it was not mealtime-- the two primary desires in Spock's short existence have been negative. He wants other children to stop criticizing him and speaking ill of his mother, and he wanted I-Chaya to _not_ be dead. To seek the positive, outside that vague and always withheld concept of 'approval', is so unfamiliar it strikes him as half-sacrilege, even in this nightmare tower of blasphemies ancient and unspeakable. His sexual awakening is decades away, but the impulse to embrace is both more innocent and more complex than that. To hold in his arms, skinny and ungainly though they may be, the the physical embodiment of the being so intimately connected to his mind… Ah, _that_ stirs a voracious hunger in the most esoteric vaults of self, all the more powerful for having never come to life before. It is not a human motivation-- or, if it is, it is not _exclusive_ to humanity-- for all nine pure-blooded children standing beside him are in the grips of it, too. 

 

By the time only Spock remains as elect, he has already memorized the steps of the task to which the temple workbench is dedicated. The tools consist of blacksmith's tongs, strainer, funnel, and twelve cubes of iridium approximately the width and breadth of two grown fists. One by one, the steward directs each child to pour forth the sand from their vessels, shifting the fine dark feldspar for any final impurities. A small hole atop the each cube betrays their functions as a mold, like those used in casting iron or glass. Since all children are exposed to the smithing and metallurgical crafts so pivotal in the art and technology of their race, each of the Chosen is able to carefully effect the transfer of raw material without prompting. Once the mold is held securely in the grip of iron tongs, each is directed to approach the darkened, recessed threshold at the far side of the chamber. Though the length of time for each individual preparation provides a comfortable interval, no one returns by the way they came. 

Such prosaic steps, like third-tier students visiting one of the ancient monasteries where blacksmiths still employ all the traditional methods of their trade. Spock observes this paraphernalia and, seeing them for the props they are, disregards them but for their practical function. He doubts any of these tools are strictly necessary but, like the grav-weights installed on air-skimmers in the first year after obtaining one's license, he is not particularly eager to face with unknown without the crutch. Pittances, really, but one unintentional lesson of the Watcher has been the value of everyday items and actions in maintaining order. The scaffolding of society. Spock's focus has narrowed beyond even the ideal for meditation; each aspect of this final blasphemy-- wrapped in actions that would have seemed even more mundane in Surak's time-- are before him. Their performance leads inexorably to his t'hy'la. 

Heedless of the words the priestess-adept murmurs to each successive petitioner, unconcerned even with their final destination, Spock is at last permitted to approach the workbench. The sand from his phial is as exotic as it was when he first came upon the small crevasse it filled in the desert. Beset with the thirst and hunger of _kahs-wan_ \-- even stumbling a little in his shameful grief-- he had at first thought it was an optical illusion. Ebony feldspar, as powdery as charcoal yet riddled with flecks of green and gold and agate. One cannot separate these out as constituent particles-- the iridescence is illusive under close inspection, but the colors are undeniably _there_. Bronze, jasper, that particularly arresting peridot-brown that Spock will someday refer to with the human term, 'hazel'. Poured into the mold, stoppered and gripped firmly by a pair of long steel tongs called 'le-matya's jaws', the sand awaits its metamorphosis, though Spock is no closer to understanding just why it was the impetus for this journey, or even how it came to be with where he found it two years ago.  
Perhaps it is best not to know. The Universe seems filled with the whispers and clickings of endless machination. The sound of the shuttle riding over threads trapped in the loom. 

He is ready to turn his full conscious attention on the darkened threshold, but the priestess-adept steps deliberately in his path. She is, it seems, determined to finish ritual grace-note and, if she senses that she provides a focal point for his subcutaneous resentment, she gives little indication. Surak's Vulcan, that impregnable and unquestionable monolith of What Is Logical, has proven itself to be a hollow reliquary. Not worthless-- not worthless at all, for it clearly keeps contained forces which would otherwise run riot. Within the vessel are salvation and hypocrisy, affirmation and deceit, all commingled. It will take time to reconcile these contradictions.

"Do you know fear?" the steward asks again, and all the passionless delivery in the annals of Kolinahr cannot hide the irony. His mother once referred to a certain Telerite diplomat's desire to add tariff corollaries to a bill on trade embargo as 'rubbing salt in the wound'. Spock, then only 4.73 years old, had turned to her sharply, perplexed by what he assumed was utterly human hyperbole. 'Surely such phrasing is unnecessary, Mother. Why would anyone do such a thing?'  
Why, indeed.

What unfolds in Spock now is not anger, however, but innocent curiosity mixed with an unexpected-- and almost unrecognized, given general unfamiliarity with emotional naming conventions-- pang of pity. He examines his own mind in the light of her repeated question, carefully considering the answer he gave before entering the passageway. No, he had not truly known fear then, but the rest of his response has been and always will be true. He would sooner harm himself than his Beloved; he will find this bondmate and shield him and face the universe at his side. What he does here in the parenthetical land of the Watcher is his glory and his shame; in trying to turn from _kaiidth_ , he has found himself face to face with it. As the humans might say, 'Amen'.  
It seems highly unlikely (0.0029%, +/- .0007% error margin) that any Chosen has ever left this place without petitioning the Breach.

_'No, they have not,'_ the polar winds whisper in his mind, snow and sand frozen to assault and abrade as one. His thought has evoked in the priestess a genuine, if very mild and quickly smothered, surprise. _'Nor has any Chosen ever thought to ask that question, Spock, son of Sarek.'_

She steps away from him then, out of his determined line of sight, and he never sets eyes on her again.

* * * * * *

Spock will spend 4.72 minims in that final chamber, but he will never be entirely certain what happens to him therein.

In the warring period directly prior to Tu'Surak, almost all Vulcan tribes were nomadic migrating constantly in such of succulents, pasturage, and scant game; shedding blood over the jealously guarded locations of secret wells and underground waterways; sometimes clashing simply for having stumbled across one another in their storm-blown wanderings. In the North, however, the subarctic climes forced tribes into temporary tenancy during the winter, resulting in labyrinthian underground complexes formed by the exploitation of caves and further industrious carving and ventilation by each successive generation. As with everything else, the tribes slaughtered one another over these hibernaculums; one particularly efficacious strategy was to locate the unavoidable vents-- usually disguised with brush or carefully arranged rock camouflage to redirect smoke-- and suffocate the occupying tribe while they slept. A 'siege' like this might actually take several days, with heartier warriors attempting to fight their way out but, in the end, the victorious usurpers would simply oust the corpses from the sudden necropolis and move in. Doing so, they quickly covered the murals and bas reliefs of the vanquished with depictions of their own histories and mythologies and legends, so that modern Vulcan infrared and laser technologies have been able to detect sometimes up to six paintings on one wall, all layered atop one another. 

In those rare instances during which he can stand to examine the experience, Spock will eventually conclude that his memory of the Breach is analogous to those ancient murals. In those sections of his consciousness dedicated to incidental learning, there exists a recollection as readily accessible as the architecture of his first computer, or the first time he utilized caustic chemical compounds without direct adult supervision. On the surface, it is a disquieting but ultimately comprehensible retrospection… one with all the correct elements of a 'real' memory. Yet beneath that, just as valid (perhaps moreso, for having been there first), is another experience entirely-- and another underneath even that. The idea of pealing away reality, even if only the experiential version of said, is alarming. And if, beneath the defining pigments and layers of plaster, something should ripple and _move_ …

 

He does his best, in the years that follow, to avoid prying at any of these layers. Thus, what happens is this:

Spock approaches the deeply shadowed threshold on the far side of the chamber, only to find that it is-- to some degree-- barred. Shards of blue-black crystal seem to dangle in long threads across the lintel, incongruous and almost… tacky. While a historically accurate aspect of those same Northern cave complexes, they have become so ubiquitous in artistic representations that it is almost cliche. For Spock, the beaded curtain is more ominous, for he has always found thoughts of those underground cities suffocating, leaving a population of corpses the young and infirm of which likely never woke during their smothering, to be singularly unwholesome. Carefully gripping the smith's tongs, he frees a hand to push the sharp, faceted obstacles aside, only for his gloved fingers to encounter nothing. Any relief or irritation at the illusion is obliterated once he pushes in past his covered forearm. Some sort of barrier is present, for ingress is accompanied by telepathic sensation-- a sort of wet, crawling putrescence that has no density at all. Afraid of dropping the mold and the precious sand within, Spock cannot afford to pause or break stride. His whole body is thus suddenly subjected to a grotesque, invasive fondling, as though something more capricious and less compassionate than even his classroom tormentors is riffling through his very being with mocking disregard for his personhood. Stifling his rising bile, wrapping himself unrepentantly around the spark of his bonded-- which flares suddenly, as if to push back the intruder-- Spock finds himself two steps and two eternities across the threshold and safely on the other side. 

He finds himself in a chamber even smaller than the previous one, the circumference of which is barely wide enough to save it from being an oubliette. Unlike the rest of the tower, it shows every evidence of age and disuse. Layer upon layer of cobwebs hang between cracked ceiling and curved wall, lengthy wisps dangling where the ambitions of tiny arachnids have outstripped the allowance of gravity. Detritus-- by now so time-worm it cannot be identified any further-- is strewn about the periphery, though the majority of the floor is covered only by a thick layer of dust. Spock is quick to note that the distribution of grime is unmarred, giving no evidence of the nine others who came before him. Unlike the rest of the tower, the walls and floor are dressed in plain limestone, smooth but otherwise unremarkable. At the center of the room, equally unadorned, is the metal lip of an ancient well. 

Save for its utterly pristine appearance in the midst of this decay, the well might at first seem anticlimactic. Assuming Spock, never overly fond of baroque artifice at the best of times, were to have any remaining tolerance for dramatics at this point. Besides, as with all other things in the Watcher's tower, it is duplicitous-- an anachronism of dull but unknown alloy aping historical style, lit by a flood of illumination mimicking sunlight. Aside from the fact it must still be night out in the desert, Spock's keen eyesight gives away the artificiality, to say nothing of the fact that-- like the glow in the passageway-- the light has no true source. 

Both hands once more securely gripping the tongs and their treasured burden, Spock approaches the well, though every cell in his body is alight with vertiginous abhorrence. The always-distant, logical observer within him finds this continual environmental effort towards disruption of equilibrium more tiresome than effective at this point-- or so he thinks, in the heat of the moment. Later, he will come to understand that the body and mind can only hold themselves ratcheted in terror for so long before the tension ceases to register, as those afflicted with arthritis become accustomed and then inured to the constant background pain. Only when the weather turns, only when the fear pitches into another octave entirely, does it enter one's consciousness afresh. He will never know, never dare to ask, if other members

( _survivors_ )

of the Chosen become as a consequence more prone to dreaming. He knows only that the quality of his thoughts, his surroundings, take on a texture so unbearable its memory will later surface only very occasionally in his subconscious mind, on the cusp

( _threshold, just another threshold_ )

of the inner sleeping psyche and the outer world. And he will know that only every ounce of _an-prele_ and the potential weight of failure can ensure that, when he wakes up screaming, the sound never exits his throat.

 

So it is not truly a well, nor is it a forge, though Spock somehow knows-- in the manner of those pressured thought-shapes from the passage-- that he is meant to treat it as the latter. Observing then all protocols associated with any open furnace or crucible-- including closing his secondary eyelids-- Spock holds the mold and attendant apparatus forth and peers over the rim. 

It is not the Breach, nor even a part of the Breach-- only the place where the blasphemy can very briefly interface with the poor organic beings who somehow made it manifest. A true Violation, more dangerous and cancerous than any fission-bomb or atomic missile. Something that should never have been, but now shall always

( _for all remorseless eons, for every agonizing nanosecond unneeded even by entropy_ )

 _ **be**_. What lurks behind this 

( _ah, just as the steward said; a prop, ritual, mirrors in infinite regression_ )

facade is _almost_ life, almost fully aware. It is conscious-- perhaps 'cognizant' is a better term-- enough to know that it should hate them

( _mortal beings, flat, imbecilic, that dare attempt and then abort creation. imperfect things decaying from the moment they exit the womb, wandering in what they believe to be isolation_ )

but lacks an essential element, the spark of _Will_ that would generate said hatred. 

It is _alone **alone ALONE**_ …

 

Into _this_ \-- not fire, not water, not nothing but No-Thing,

( _for the term 'void' implies the possibility of being filled and there are no possibilities here. all is known, and so there can never be anything new._ )

Spock thrusts the mold. That is what must have happened, though the only image in his mind, shot through every all-false/all-true layer of memory, is that of thin dark ice under which sharp bubbles even darker move with terrible intent. It wants to withhold the Name-- all names. Rather, it wants to be able to want that, but it does not know or understand choice and so…

 

Spock does not blink. There is no interruption in consciousness, and yet he finds himself standing in a courtyard outside the Watcher of Watchers, clutching a warm and somehow comforting object in his hands. There is triumph in him, enough to help him stand firm and impassive before the gathered adults of the caravan and the Chosen who went before him. It is almost enough to blot out the realization-- which should have come to him long before-- that the final chamber only had one door. A slight breeze touches the chill of desert darkness against his cheeks. It _is_ still night, and T'Khut rides high at her apogee across the cloudless, starless sky. T'Khut, the sister planet, sometimes also called 'The Watcher'. So very many watchers of Vulcan-- what is it they are watching for?

All around Spock are pleasingly, _decently_ stoic faces, more constant than the torchlight playing over them. This is how it must have looked even in those early generations after Surak; pilgrims gathered to await the successful Chosen, hushed with an anticipation that had not quite let the old gods die. 

( _'The T'hy'la of Surak asked for a boon, and it was granted…'_ )

Without turning his head or obviously shifting his gaze, Spock at last spots his mother, standing beside her bondmate at the periphery of the small crowd. She still wears the disquieting plasiglass vizor, but he should never the less be able to see her expression-- her smile. Indeed, he would welcome it, for none of the grotesque statues along the gauntlet evinced a single positive emotion-- at least, as he understands such things-- and she always seems quietly pleased by his successes. Yet it is a small and wan thing this time, her smile. She seems small, delicate, dwarfed beside his father and surrounding by those who espouse IDIC whilst giving her wide berth. She fought long and hard to accompany them on this trip, determined to lay her own eyes on the site that determined so much of her destiny. Thus, she is now the only non-Vulcan ever to visit the Watcher, a fact only highlighted by her distance from the others and her stance-- oddly tense, perhaps even a step further away from his father than is customary for either of them. 

It occurs to Spock then-- with all the deceptive brevity of a small but deadly detail-- that _she_ was once a child on Earth, living an ordinary, if already scholastically remarkable, life. A girl with her own place in a Terran family, absorbed in whatever largely illogical pursuits human children busy themselves with outside of academics. There is even a photo depicting as much-- a very small one, on a shelf in her private study. She's sitting on an unsound-looking wooden swing, a slight creature of eleven, with blue ribbons to crown her cascading hair, dressed in a style briefly popular on Earth as 'cyber renaissance'. Her smile is abashed and somehow unrepentant, the calm nature of the pose belayed by the thick splashes of mud trailing up her ankles. Into that orderly life there would have come figures cloaked in shadow-- for _Kashkau_ Adepts always collect off-world _telsu_ , and they always travel in threes-- to bear her away from that water-rich world. To the ancient sands of Vulcan, old when the first hominids of her world were young.

Somewhere too, on Earth or one of her outposts, Spock's t'hy'la waits in ignorance. Perhaps he has been touched by a dream or a spell of semi-consciousness (not an unknown phenomena, even amongst exclusively Vulcan bondings), but he will have no context for it, no conscious understanding that the trajectory of his life has changed. 

At that thought, both the child and the atavistic bondmate in Spock crowd out all but anticipation, the chant of 'soon, soon, soon'. The notion of consequences will return with a vengeance later. For now, looking down at the object in his hands-- a smaller cube with edges seemingly rounded to kiss his cupping palms-- he is wholly absorbed. The color of the sand-- amber, verdigris, cadmium gold-- are all present therein, fluctuating vividly with script that shifts from Vulcan to binary, through Standard and several other identifiers, including what appear to be pulsar-based coordinates. What they convey is now the only thing blazing in Spock's mind, his own internal sun:

JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK

. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glossary/Notes:  
> [+] "Dom nam-tor vohris nem-tor ha'kiv"- 'then be slow to take a life'. Saying attributed to Surak.  
> [+] "I'wak mesukh-yut t'on."- 'the present is the crossroads of both (the past and the future)'. Saying attributed to Surak.  
> [+] _K'hat'n'dlawa_ \- "the other half of one's heart/soul" (pre-Reform).  
> [+] _waneti_ \- flowering plant with small white blooms.  
> [+] _buk_ \- fate/destiny.  
> [+] _enok-ka-fi_ \- over-all pain control meditation.  
> [+] _an-prele_ \- the second stage of _enok-ka-fi_ , usually mastered between ages 16 and 19.  
> [+] the detail about T'Khut sometimes being referred to as 'the Watcher' also came from the [VLD](https://www.starbase-10.de/vld/).  
> [+] The idea of pulsar-based coordinates comes from the golden record included with the ~~V'ger~~ Voyager probe, which uses local pulsars in an attempt to depict the origin of the craft and provide a map back to Earth. I've heard tell its somewhat off, though. ;-) Still, you need some way to navigate in space. 
> 
> As always, I'd love to hear from you-- hopefully this hasn't been too much of a departure from how we started out. Feedback, as a certain paper co-written by T'Pau and Susan Sto Helit on the Uncertainty Principle holds, is a Very Good Thing. (Just trust me on this. ^_~)


	3. The Favor

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had hoped to get to Jim's POV in this section, but work has gotten a bit crazy in RL, so I figured it's better to post what I have so you know this story is still alive and kickin'. I apologize for the lack of direct K/S in this chapter, but I promise there's more coming up soon. That said, please enjoy some BAMF Winona Kirk, and a Pike who didn't anticipate any of this shit when he rolled out of bed in the morning.

"That's a bit more than a 'favor', Winona."

Christopher Pike listens to himself speak with more than a mild sense of relief. He is not a man accustomed to internal disconnects but, in this instance, he can honestly say he had no idea what was going to come out of his mouth until the words were already making their exit. He prefers to think of himself as a man of careful deliberation-- it's an invaluable trait in a Starfleet captain, insofar as the unknowns of space and alien cultures will allow. There are certain scenarios, however, in which a gut reaction is impossible to avoid.  
He's pretty sure treason is one of them.

That's what Winona Kirk is suggesting right now-- treason. Disconcertingly informal in her sea-green civilian tunic and sensible trousers, hands cupped around a mug of tea which has long since cooled, she looks more like a small-town girl mulling over a choice of evening diversion than an officer contemplating violation of her oaths. But she _isn't_ contemplating anything, is she? No, he can see it in her eyes-- an umber not of tree bark, but of petrified wood-- that the time for consideration has passed. Her course has been plotted and entered. Now, here, in this stone kitchen with all its clever rustic disguises of modern technology, she is asking him to aid and abet. Hell, at this point, he's in for willful negligence whether or not he actually participates. Unless, of course, he turns her in the moment he steps off her porch.  
He won't, and she knows that. She can be a cruel woman, sometimes.

That word hovers in the air regardless, unarticulated and ponderous. Outside, the winter wind seems to whisper it through the bare trees; _'treason'_ , like the chorus of some techno-folk dirge. The kind that only seems profound when you're alone in a crowd at 02:00, staring into a cracked bar-top mirror and wondering who that son-of-a-bitch in the reflection is. And they are alone-- utterly separate-- together, in this moment: Captain and Lieutenant Commander, across from one another at a large, sturdy wooden table made by some Kirk relation three or four generations back. The top is polished as ruthlessly as any 'fleet navigation console, with wandering maple leaves carved into the table legs and the splats of the attendant chairs. There are only three seats gathered about the circumference. The fourth has been moved to the far corner of the kitchen, where it sits in mute testament-- not relegated, but _enshrined_. Pike does his best to avoid looking at it. There's no need to give his host even a false impression of weakness and, more importantly, no use in imagining this mother and her two children eating in silence, each scrape of the fork or clink of cup echoing off a void. Worse still is the possibility of the third chair sitting empty as well.  
And then there were two. 

 

She's going to try and wait him out-- a philosophical tug-of-war Chris wouldn't be interested in on the best of days. Calmly, carefully, he thinks things through the way he always does-- in his own damn time, thank you very much. The cup of tea untouched by his left hand feels very much like a prop, and the slim engineer-- one of those fortunate women who seem ageless when dressed down and wearing a pony-tail-- betrays no more movement than the occasional glance out the window. He knows she isn't interested in the unquiet wind or the frost-laced Iowa landscape. She's keeping an eye out should the subject of their conversation return unexpectedly from his play. The elder Kirk son, Sam, is off at Iowa State University taking advantage of the family's extended time planet-side to attend a weekend junior biology seminar. Only the younger remains and, though his exposure to the boy in question has not been extensive, 'Uncle' Chris knows it's equally likely he'll range about the outdoors until dark or come rushing in at any moment to show off some find. Or wound-- that one has never encountered a tree or boulder he didn't want to climb.

"What makes you think they'll ask for another human, let alone Jim?" Pike asks evenly. As a Starfleet officer, he has sworn to uphold and protect the observance of all Federation law, even the ones he may not necessarily personally agree with. Article 57 (Clause 9, Subsection A)-- known throughout alpha quadrant simply as 'The Clause'-- doesn't sit too well with most Terrans, and it has its fair share of detractors amongst the rest of the member worlds as well. If it were more frequently exercised, its required adoption for acceptance into the Federation might have been more hotly contested or, worse still, become a tipping point for secession. As it stands, it seems just enough time passes between invocations of said legislation, with no one species overly targeted, that flares of controversy have yet to result in concrete action. Given the opportunity to consign the loss to the past-- mythologize it as martyrdom, in some cases-- it seems the myriad cultures of the 'civilized' galaxy can reconcile themselves to just about anything. Perhaps the Vulcans planned it that way.  
Pike wouldn't put it past them.

"Nice try," Winona concedes, combining a sharp smile with a look of faux-pity. "I'm not going to implicate anyone else, just like I won't implicate you if there's ever an inquest. As far as anyone else-- especially Starfleet-- is concerned, you're just doing me a personal favor. Jim _has_ been wild to participate in the colonization effort and, since I've accepted the posting on Starbase 14, the window of opportunity for him to join has narrowed considerably. I'll be shipping out, Sam in tow, two weeks from now. If you don't help me swap the seating, the second Tarsus shuttle doesn't leave for four. Jimmy's too young for me to put him up anywhere unattended for that long. Simple as that."

Chris raises an eyebrow at the assumption of his cooperation-- no less easy and confident for remaining currently tacit-- but lets it slide. He's mentally reviewing all of her diplomatic and/or brass connections (and he knows she can tell) but, at the end of the day, he was George's best friend, not hers. He doesn't know who she ran with at the Academy, who might have served alongside her at any one of numerous duty stations and now feel-- in the manner of those who bleed and sweat in the Black together-- they owe her a favor of this magnitude.

"The tip may have been completely anonymous, besides," she shrugs, answering the unasked question. "Enough people were appalled by the Grayson Incident that its highly probable."

"You think the Vulcans are going to take another… ward," he pauses, cursing himself for not having a concrete choice of term in advance, but it still sounds better than 'tribute' or 'pledge'. The official Vulcan term, _Pudvel-Tor_ , is almost guaranteed to trip her not inconsiderable temper. "You think they will again call upon Earth, when we've only been asked once before in the 178 years since First Contact," he holds up a finger to forestall her interruption, willing her analytical mind will latch onto the variables, the sheer improbability of the situation, "That, of all the billions of people on this planet-- to say nothing of Terran colonies-- they will take _your_ son." In a way, he's repeating himself, but summarizing the theoretical situation doesn't make it sound any less ludicrous. He supposes its too late to hope she'll suddenly notice that now. 

"Yes." Absolute and decisive. He isn't talking to an engineer right now; he's talking to a mother. A parent, to be fair. He thinks-- hell, he _knows_ \-- George would fight this tooth and nail with just as much determination as his wife, were he still alive. 

 

While Pike's gaze does not veer towards that empty chair, which only six months ago had a tenant to welcome on dirt-side leave, his mind's eye is full of his friend. Of a firm handshake early in Academy days; of keen blue eyes and a laugh that-- while never unkind-- would not have been out of place on a Viking marauder. They spent their command track days training on equipment that could have gotten them killed, and their nights doing things that skirted the line of getting booted out entirely. Work hard, play harder; the kind of interpersonal gravity that has for good or ill, always been a hidden portion of the mortar in any army's _esprit de corps_.

Neither of them were particularly 'edgy'-- no holo-sex hookups, joy trains, or synesthesia parlors for them-- but they had been young soldiers with a taste for drink and a weakness for Altaran craps, and they were not unknown down at Delta Dawn's Den of Delights ('all manner of sexy for all manner of being'). George was shit at darts, an ace at pool, and as amiable about losing as he was about winning. It was hard to stay mad at him, whether he'd just cleaned you out on a run of good fortune at dice or skewed the grading curve by two points in the graduate-level Astrogation and Warp-Vacuum Dynamics seminar. Like Chris, he was extremely intelligent without quite edging into the category of 'genius'. They both worked their asses off, especially in command-track courses, spending as many nights hitting the PADDs and quizzing each other as they did participating in wild escapades, both graduating in the top twenty of their class. They'd drifted apart a bit after that, given wildly disparate first assignments and focusing-- as so many newly-minted 'Fleet officers do-- almost solely on their careers, but they still met to drink or carouse whenever they had leave anywhere near the same sector. 

Only once were they stationed together, and briefly at that. The situation on Casea 7 was volatile enough to that six months still gave them plenty of time to save each others' hides several times over. Furthermore, the combination of planet-wide evacuation, impending extinction-level event, and warring civilian factions of multiple mixed species set the situation at FUBAR almost from the first stardate. Fleet brass, in a peace-time mindset save for the then rare border conflicts with Klingons or Romulans, had sorely underestimated the whole affair, not to mention the cross-species loyalty of fanatics devoted to the same quasi-religious cause. Fleet PsyOps really missed the mark on that one. While military casualties never eclipsed losses during the war for Martian Independence, Casea 7 had still be the most deadly conflict Earth-- though not the Federation as a whole-- had seen within its own borders since the red planet ceased to be a colony. It put a lot of officers through the fire, Kirk and Pike among them, and with the burning of steel and experience came memories branded and scored beyond what any dermal generator could erase. Every member of Starfleet carries such marks, tattoos or perpetual gangrene on the psyche, but Chris and George came out with quite a few that matched. When Chris' sister-in-law and nephew settled down in Iowa, he became as frequent a guest of the Kirks when planet-side as he was of his own kin. 

If it's cliche, then so be it-- though Pike has discovered over the years that 'cliche' is often a cover for 'sadly common experience'-- but it was nice to knock back a few with George and let all the stories they were willing to recount stand in for the ones they could never bring themselves to tell. He can still see his friend's face, smeared with soot and rust, animated by joy and disbelief as the last shuttle pulled away from the sorry (and rapidly dissolving) rock that had been Casea 7. George had laughed that Viking bowman's laugh, his teeth shockingly white and his eyes alight with that half-madness that comes when victory lies in simply being alive. When Chris thinks about the fact that such a man-- his friend and brother in arms-- died in what is beginning to look like sabotage over trade disputes… yeah, he does feel like that lanky Lieutenant who has just lost his first crew member, railing at the Universe because he'd thought in youthful hubris that it would never happen to him.

 

He can imagine George in this situation, all geniality and merriment drained from that mobile face, stating 'yes' with the same deadly intensity as the woman he loved does presently. ' _Yes_ , I _know_ they want my son and , _yes_ , I will fight them with every atom of by being'. It's this vision of his friend, an almost palpable presence he and Winona have conjured between them like two spiritualists listening for knocks on the kitchen table, which makes Chris falter briefly.

"The chances--"

"'Oh, it will never be _my_ child'," Mrs. Kirk says, seven months into widowhood , affecting a cadence of the rhetorical which is all the more mocking for its calm, rational tone. "Don't you think every parent tells themselves that? Don't you think that must have been their fucking mantra when the United-Nations-That-Was ratified joining the Federation? 'It will never be us, never be our children. Not even our grandchildren and, when it comes time to pay the piper, we'll all be dead and well beyond concerns about constituents and reelection."

She's right, of course, even if the situation was probably a bit more complex for the illustrious leaders of the past. They'd known, those international politicians of yore, that the Vulcan's weren't going to ask for a 'ward' directly after Earth's acceptance of Federation by-laws. That would have been bad business-- even the Pied Piper and Rumpelstiltskin were wise enough not to ask for payment upfront. ' _It's the interest,_ ' Chris remembers reading somewhere, probably in one of those novels assigned for Pre-Warp Lit class. ' _The original debt hurt you, but it was the interest that broke your back._ ' 

Perhaps if their new benefactors had requested a child right away, Earth would have turned the Vulcans from her door and struck out in the wide, frightening galaxy the way humans historically blundered into any new frontier. Given that less-than-stellar record, it was likely better for the quadrant at large that integration into the Federation occurred in a relatively orderly fashion. Yet a part of Pike-- and this part gets larger every year, like a cancer activated by military politics instead of UV rays-- that even an outright demand for a child-tribute (let's call a spade a spade) would not have held back the greed and ambition of those in the hidden star-chambers of power. After all, the Vulcans didn't just bring peaceful greetings and knowledge of systems and civilizations far beyond Sol. They brought _technology_ and, if that technology came with strings forbidding martial research and application… well, that sub-species of human known as the 'politician' had plenty of evolutionary experience with wiggling around said. 

 

Earth had been just shy of warp-capable when Zephram Cochrane made first contact, but that hadn't meant they were ready to act as a single unit-- a planet, a _species_ \-- instead of more than a hundred nations whose attitudes were more often like high-schoolers frantically posturing than societies capable of innovation and art (to say nothing of developing, and then lobbing, atomic bombs). Nor had it meant that everyone on said planet was ready for confirmation of intelligent life in the universe-- especially when that life was as serenely rational and intimidating as the Vulcans.

There hadn't been wide-spread panic of which the Brookings Report had so ominously warned; no disintegration of society, no religious hysteria one might have expected even in the early 21st century, and certainly none of the blind rumor-fueled mania inspired by Orson Welles' mellifluous 'War of the Worlds' broadcast. Yet, by that same token, the world was restless and undecided-- too addicted to the status quo and their own comfort to tip over into chaos, but resentful and discomforted to have their consensus reality disturbed. No science-fiction B movie scenario had prepared them for _this_. There were no insectiod monstrosities bent on conquest, no tabloid reptilians or prodigal sky gods of yore, nor even apostates from hell heralding Armageddon. Only the scientists and archivists of the galaxy arriving on Earth's doorstep, calmly bearing news of a multitude of other species which, while foreign and sometimes outright strange, were not as _alien_ as humanity assumed aliens ought to be. The myriad cultures of the galaxy also howled in agony or smiled in joy (though not necessarily always with analogous organs); they made love, and war, and a dozen more problems anytime someone came up with a single solution. They, too, looked amongst themselves and wondered at the origin of this thing at once so prosaic and so inexplicable-- that not merely life should exist, but life with **sentience**.

For all the dichotomy between modern Vulcan culture and that of Terra, only the children of Tu'Surak could managed so amicable and smooth an alliance with humanity, though even their effort was by no means flawless. These visitors might speak of a bloody past and drives which could only be controlled through strict adherence to logic but, for all their technological prowess, it was difficult to imagine this particular race of aliens waging any sort of war. One of Pike's comparative Xenoculture professors-- tenured, and therefore more loose-lipped than most-- had advanced the idea that Vulcan's were the galaxy's ultimate masters of Public Relations, to the degree that they actually bought into their own hype. There are no Vulcans in Starfleet, but Chris has enough experience with VSA contractors and political attaches to personally find that statement a little overly critical, but no one can deny that a closed society allows for a great deal of image control even as it encourages a sort of awed speculation from outsiders. Meager human contact with _Kash-nohv_ Adepts and the _Kolinahru_ has certainly added to the mystique, but Vulcans don't have the market cornered when it it comes to managing what other species see. After all, as Pike's mother used to say, everyone tidies up when they know company's coming.

Whatever may or may not lie beyond the thick lacquer of Vulcan stoicism, they have indisputably developed themselves as a race of scientists and diplomats, disciples of logic with a capital 'L', and they have been the primary organizing force for peace in the quadrant since their own race achieved interstellar travel. By the time Terran first contact had taken place, they had practice bringing new worlds into the Federation-- which was, at the time, more a loose league of planets than anything else. Their process for integrating new contributors economically and academically recognized Surak's principle of IDIC and the innovations fresh perspective might bring. The human zeal for exploration-- among other things-- helped strengthen the Federation into an entity more suited to the standard definition: as monolithic as it is multi-faceted, and far more inviolate in the minds of its citizens than it is in reality. The conditions for this cohesion had become even more favorable shortly after Earth's inclusion-- an exacerbation of already fanatical Klingon militarism under a new Supreme Commander combined with border disputes between multiple species and Romulan encroachers made fertile intellectual soil for interstellar 'nation building' and the formation of a common 'Federation' identity. It my no means usurped species identity for any of the strengthening coalition members, but a mutual enemy (or enemies) made it easier to gloss over the sometimes radical differences between worlds. 

That humans-- neophytes amongst galactic sophisticates and far younger than most species, to boot-- became such a strong influence in so short a span of time is as remarkable as it is sometimes disconcerting. Yet they never would have gained such sway without the inadvertent assistance of the Vulcans. For good or ill, whether the logical and pacifist tutelage stuck or not, the experience of the elder race allowed humanity time to find its footing. And, as unmoved by the tantrums of an ontologically volatile race as a parent remains unmoved by the stormy moods of a toddler, even the Vulcans had to admit that the free expression and emotional range of Earthlings-- to say nothing of their 'gut' impulses and intuition-- struck them as… 'singular' in their centuries of experience. Just as Tellarites are infamous for being argumentative, Andorians for their delicate manners and philosophical evasiveness, and Betazoids for their empathy, so too has humanity quickly earned its own stamp of social generalization-- as the wild card. Not as tempestuous as Klingons or as coldly vengeful as Romulans, but still given to fits of inspiration, hubris, and compassion as inexplicable to outsiders as they are unpredictable. 

Bringing no new strange gods, proselytizing not once for Surak's Logic, and clearly disinterested in rule, the Vulcan quickly went from being an existential threat to a sort of strange but tolerated order of the quasi-divine-- something like the faey Gentry of old Gaelic countries, perhaps. They helped usher in a new golden age the likes of which Earth had, in the wake of the Eugenics Wars, begun to fear it would never see again.

Of course, there's always a catch.

 

The silence between Pike and Lieutenant Commander Kirk has collected like cobwebs in the corners of the farmhouse kitchen. Neither one of them shifting or showing a moment's restlessness, the two friends 

( _no, he cannot think of them as such, not just now_ )

the two _officers_ stare at one another as if awaiting some off-stage cue. 

"I also talked to Chelsea," Winona says. If she thinks she's pressing some sort of advantage, she is sadly mistaken. Pike feels himself stiffen and makes no attempt to disguise it, because it isn't a tell-- it's a goddamn warning. And there it is, the temper some even amongst his most seasoned crew members doubt he has. Chris spent his young adulthood making such an effort to conceal what he saw as a personal weakness that it now rarely slips its leash, but it is not an aspect of self one can erase entirely. It helps that he's never been one to run hot. No, his anger is cold, glacially slow but just as massive as said, carving out canyons and tearing down mountains in its patient and cycolpean stirrings. 

"You are _way_ out of line, Winona," he observes in an icy calm which, unfortunately, does not mitigate the volume. He doesn't _sound_ angry, at least to his own ears. It's more as though he's speaking to reach the back of a lecture hall. His outburst, however, is quickly followed by a loud and unexpected creak from the floor above, leaving both Chris and the new Widow Kirk to freeze like guilty children. Pike narrows his eyes questioningly at the 'fleet engineer, privately thinking that at least one of them has some very valid reasons to feel caught. Winona shakes her head, touching a finger to her lips before pointing (a bit obviously) upward. The old clock in the hallway ticks patiently through the tension, like a knife against the cutting board, but there's no follow-up movement to echo the first.

 

At last, much more quietly, "I thought you said Jim was outside."

"He is. That's Ann upstairs, napping so she can last through tonight's marathon Revival down at the new MCS hall."

Chris blinks, caught between chastising himself for completely forgetting the house's other likely occupant and genuine surprise. While he'd heard Winona's mother-in-law had 'caught religion' after her husband passed (which makes it sound like she's come down with a cause of Argellian mumps or some such), he'd had no idea she'd gotten involved with a sect as radical as the Modern Church of Salvation. Suddenly, this whole proposal seems even more spectacularly unwise, Vulcans and/or possible treason notwithstanding. 

" _That's_ why _she_ signed up for the Tarsus effort?" Chris asks, keeping his incredulity at a half-whisper. A number of pieces suddenly fit together in his mind: why Winona was originally so completely opposed to Jim joining the project, and how truly desperate she must be to consider this about-face. "Christ, think about what you're doing here, all based on a tip that may or may not have merit!" He leans towards her, as though the earnestness in his expression will somehow convey the point his words are so clearly falling short of. "Even if this… _insane_ theory is somehow correct, what does wedging Jim into the first batch of colonists really accomplish? So you buy a couple of months while the ship is in transit, maybe even a year or so while warp-drive navigation beacons are put in place. I get it-- it's the ass-end of the galaxy. Then what? The Vulcans will come for him all the same." The factual tone of his voice has turned somewhat ruthless, but he won't let himself feel sorry for her. Not when she's been interfering with his family. 

Finally, his hostess betrays some of her own agitation, raking fingers over and past her forehead until a few sable-blond wisps of hair come loose from her ponytail. "This isn't a plan, it's a stop-gap. I'll be the first person to admit none of this is ideal, but I am trying to salvage something workable here!"

"By involving my sister-in-law in this sudden bout of paranoia?" he all but grits out. "Are you out of your damn mind? If you get caught, if UCFJ* can prove she knew-- even suspected!-- anything about it, it would mar her citizen's record for the rest of her life. It would jeopardize her custody and, even if she were ultimately cleared, Johnny could still spend months in foster care." Or with his father, which Pike privately (and rather ashamedly) thinks is worse. 

Winona has the nerve to take umbrage. "All I did was float the idea of a swap with her, and I waited until she voiced concerns about Johnny so it looked like _I_ was offering to help. I didn't even imply I had my own reasons." She stands, bracing her hands on the table almost as though bending over a screen full of schematics. "Look-- all cards down, okay? Tarsus represents a second chance for a lot of people, your brother included. Ann and I have never seen eye-to-eye, even before all this MCS nonsense. She's been in a tailspin ever since the Gunny died," she continues, referring to Tiberius Kirk. A hero of the Martian War for Independence (even if he did end up being on the losing side) and one of the last generations of Marines before the Corps was fully absorbed into Starfleet. It occurs to Pike, distant and unrelated, that he has never heard Winona or even George refer to the Kirk patriarch as anything other than 'the Gunny'. 

"Maybe," and now the Lieutenant Commander does sound like she's trying to convince herself, "this sort of 24/7 endeavor, building a foundation that could blossom into a whole new world, is just the thing she needs to get her head back on straight. She's still a brilliant municipal star-base planner. Do I _like_ that she'd going with a bunch of MCS nut bars? No. Do I really want to leave Jim alone with her? That's a big ol' negative too. But, despite what the good 'brothers and sisters' may have convinced themselves, this _isn't_ an MCS undertaking. There will be plenty of beings from this planet and others-- every political, economic, and spiritual stripe you can imagine. Kodos is leading the first large-scale colonization effort in twenty-five years and--"

"Spare me the recruiting speech," Pike snaps, still smarting from her familial manipulations and the mention of his brother. 

 

Any and all power help him, he's _embarrassed_ by Tim. Not ashamed, there's that at least, but chagrined in a way that implies some arrogance or elitism on his part. Chris is a starship captain and his baby brother-- brilliant, mercurial, hard-headed Tim-- could have put in his grunt-time and then had his pick of the best statistical analytics and programming jobs in the quadrant. Yet the patient tenacity so abundant in the elder Pike is utterly absent in the younger. Tim is leagues smarter, sure, but he's also impatient, entitled, and possessed of a chip on his shoulder almost as vast as his intellect. Always looking for that short-cut to glory-- too good for the entry-level work it takes to move up (and, Chris' burgeoning cynicism adds, without familial connections that would render said effort unnecessary). Too convinced, as well, of his own brilliance to resist the allure of less reputable applications for his talent. Data theft, console game grifting, audit and identity forgery-- he's been convicted of them all, multiple times. Usually as the fall guy for others who, while perhaps less intelligent, have the instincts and the street-smarts to 'get' while the getting is good. If Tim hadn't been so good at the intellectual aspects of deception, maybe he might not have come to the attention of all the wrong people in the first place. 

Winona is right on one count: Tarsus _is_ a second chance for many of her colonists. For Tim, it's the last shot at avoiding what is colloquially referred to as a 'long hitch'-- the sort of serious prison sentence that led to the infamous overcrowding of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Completely voluntary 'work release' programs-- instituted as star bases and far-flung colonies began steadily proliferating after the Eugenics War-- have helped reduce the number of offenders incarcerated for long periods of time. Restructuring of drug-related offenses and a renewed focus on holding only those presenting an immediate danger to society is also a major factor; the release programs are offered to the sort of non-violent offenders who-- in Earth's modern, well-ordered society-- find themselves on the wrong path mostly because they are bored, impatient, or feel out of place. Smart, but not Starfleet material, fiercely loyal in tight-knit social groups but utterly adrift and possibly 'maladjusted' in the swarming Federation mainstream. Driven, but directionless, these are exactly the sort of personality types that can wed themselves to an idea like the Tarsus Colony and work for it with every fiber of their formerly unmoored being. They can work with the authority that causes them to chafe, while at the same time achieving a livable distance from it. Such endeavors have yielded great success before, but the disastrous fate of Casea 7 and an unfortunate chain of space-faring disasters has made the public far more leery in the past few decades. Now, with collective memory fading and a new expansionist spirit on the rise, humanity seems ready to try it again on a truly worthy scale. 

Tim has been offered a seven-year hitch, with the option to renew. First, the obligatory five years every colonist-- civilian, 'fleet, release personnel, or otherwise-- signs on for while foundations are established and the isotropic beacons necessary for warp-drive navigation are put into place. For that period, those on the Tarsus colony won't be playing at pioneer-- they'll be living it, as cut off from Earth as any New World colony was from her mother country far across the Atlantic. Only deep-space exploration vessels possess navigation equipment sophisticated enough to warp without beacon guidance, and they don't stop off to play taxi just because some Mr. John or Jane Q. Public belatedly figures out the whole affair isn't merely a camping trip. There can be no flinching from the task at hand and, of course, there's a whole slew of psyche evals to weed out those likely find the enterprise more emotionally daunting than it looks on paper. The sheer amount of resources required to establish a military outpost on the edges of the star-map are staggering; for a functioning civilian settlement, it's-- pun entirely intended-- astronomical. 

RPs (release personnel) get an additional two years for 'community service', which can count as 'time served' for up to a decade's worth of actual sentencing, depending on the severity of the original crime and performance during their initial stint. All in all, it's not a a bad deal for the younger Pike brother, and it might just save the man's marriage. To say nothing of his relationship with his son, provided he can finally crane around that chip on his shoulder enough to see what he's been putting his family through for all these years. That doesn't mean Chris appreciates having any of it thrown in his face or exploited by Winona as she carefully manipulates strands of her likely quixotic web. 

 

"I'm just saying that I _get_ why Jim is so obsessed with the idea," the Lieutenant Commander says presently, seemingly unperturbed by the tectonic forces she has riled. "He has a pioneer's soul if ever I saw one." Briefly, she closes her eyes, as though consulting some sort of internal tactical diagram. "I know you're pissed right now, but I'm trying to level with you. I could have just let Chelsea contact you about the switch, with no clue about my ulterior motives. Don't pretend you wouldn't have done it without a single thought, if it had come from her."

Pike is well aware he _would_ have done just that; fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. There are things that taste more bitter than the knowledge you've been easily played-- betrayal and defeat among them-- but the list is short. The bile is in his throat because, while he has only used his rank to grease the wheels of Federation bureaucracy twice (both times in the service of causes he considered just), he can't avoid how thoughtlessly he would have jumped on this. Swap Johnny Pike's seat on the first Tarsus ship for Jim. Why the hell not? They'd both end up in the same place, and Jonny could go on the second ship with his mother, instead of being stuck in the care of a father he barely knows for forty days.

( _'Forty days and forty nights.' The phrase echoes from somewhere deep in the stale and stagnant waters of early childhood. The length of what? Not wandering in the desert… no, the water metaphor gives it away. The length of the flood that made the world anew._ )

The intrusion of such mental flotsam is highly uncharacteristic, and it aggravates his already raised hackles. Chris doesn't stand to match Winona, resisting the urge to leverage height and even the playing field of body language once more. Instead, he leans back in his chair, one ankle resting on his knee, and looks at this unexpected adversary afresh. Because he doesn't know her much beyond the polite level of "George's wife" and the general _esprit de corps_ of fellow Starfleet officers, he's spend the last hour or so buying into her initial presentation. And G-d, she is _good_ \-- if it were a matter of facing down a squadron of warbirds, he'd have her at his phaser bank any day of the week. Yet, the longer this goes on, the more he can see something shifting quietly beneath her strategic, calculating mien. 

He'd thought of desperation before, about the protective instincts of a parent. What inspires that, kicking the needle from zero to sixty in less time than it takes to inhale? Not just a tip-- not even from a trusted friend, let alone some anonymous source. Not when someone has laid over a decade of their own life on the altar of Starfleet, to say nothing of a husband's life and blood. The security leak is like a match dropped in an ill-kept storehouse; fuel must have already been present, some hulk of inchoate fear within her ready and waiting set off this wretched chain reaction. 

"Don't you understand that I need this time? _That's_ what I'm really playing for, here. If the _Kash-nohv_ \--" and here, while her wince is well-hidden, her voice softens like one afraid to speak of the devil, "-- take Jim before I have time to mount a legal defense, then they'll have already won. Possession is nine-tenths of the law. But I can stall, if I can keep Jim in a sort of… custodial limbo while I figure out some way to use the system to _my_ advantage, I might be able to work up some political traction."

"And what?" Chris asks, astonished by both the idea itself and the iron-clad temerity of the woman who would attempt it. "Overturn almost two hundred years of Terran/Federation law? Almost a thousand years of _galactic_ law?"

"Thousands of dissertations have been written on the Grayson case," Winona retorts. "I'll bet there are just as many lawyers out there who'd love to make their name on a case like this, win or lose." There's a wild flash in her eyes, a kind of lunatic hope, which she masters after only a few moments. "If they have to take Jim… G-d, he's so young. I need him to understand how hard his family is willing to fight for him. I don't want him to end up like Amanda."

 

' _Amanda_ ', Pike thinks, turning the appellation over in his mind-- the way the Lieutenant Commander uses it in conversation, as if both she and he are on a first name basis with the woman. Familiar. In a way, he supposes they are; members of the same generation, who watched with fascinated horror and a powerful echo of child's fear 

( _the boogeyman, der Erlkonig, the witch who fattened children, angry giants who grind bones for their bread_ ) 

as someone who could have been their sister or their neighbor or their best school-friend was spirited away by hooded and uncommunicative emissaries of an alien world. Before he can speak again, his hostess holds up a hand, and it's probably just as well. Whatever happened to that girl on Vulcan will likely never be known objectively, though there are plenty of psychology papers and interviews with her family that put it down to a sort of capture-bonding. Taken from Earth at the age of eleven, Amanda Grayson remained on Vulcan long after she reached the Federation age of majority that effectively ended any obligations stemming from Clause 9. More alarming than this seeming acculturation, at least to those she'd left behind, was her subsequent marriage to a Vulcan diplomat and the birth of her hybrid child. Her return trips to Earth were brief and-- likely due to intense media scrutiny-- far-between; her claims that she missed her family and sought renewed relations greatly hampered by the fact she would not condemn the Clause. 'The Vulcan way is not easy,' was her confident statement during her first Terran interview, 'nor is it appropriate for everyone, but I have found my wardship with them illuminating, useful, and ultimately rewarding.' 

Humanity's reaction to that-- to say nothing of the conspiracy theories and xenophobic insularity it inspired-- is not a rabbit-hole Pike and Lieutenant Kirk can afford to go down right now. 

"I respect you enough to be honest," she finishes, decisive but also somehow lost, as though she's reached the point of a mission where the number of unknowns eclipse any strategic planning. "George would never forgive me if I pulled you into this under false pretenses."

 

Chris is willing to acknowledge that everything she's said so far is true. He's even willing to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe respect played a factor in how she's presented this, but he doesn't think it's quite the compelling factor she's making it out to be. That ruthless flash in her eyes, the set of her jaw when she said she was willing to fight and wanted Jim to understand as much-- _that_ tells him honor ranks a distant second when it comes to her boys. And who can say that is wrong? Childless, Pike himself is in no position to judge. 

( _'She also wants to tell someone,' instinct whispers, rusty and creaking because Pike is rarely an instinctual or intuitive man. It's just not his style, command or otherwise. 'She _has_ to tell someone-- this is eating her up inside. The only way to do that and ensure her confessor's silence is to implicate them as well. She chose you because the emotional leverage is one step removed and the memory of the dead is a more potent fulcrum than the living, with whom you can argue. She probably hasn't consciously admitted any of this to herself, but it's true all the same.' Faint or no, the knowledge is perfectly audible in the sudden quiet of his being. The still, small voice of calm, his Number One calls it._ )

 

"You're lying," Pike tells her, outwardly mirroring that same, sudden and inexplicable serenity within. That's a little strong, as the sin is more one of omission, but he has to lean hard into any counterpoint he makes. Nothing else will get through to her. Before she can issue a hot but controlled denial, he continues, "And you're lying in the most effective way possible-- by including a great deal of the truth. Something else is going on here, though, and I really think it has you rattled."

"Don't back me into a corner, Captain," Winona warns, so conspicuously calm she may as well be at parade rest.

"You're already there." He's so confident, he can afford a small concession, "and from what I see, you're making a defensible position out of it. You say you respect me? Then don't insult my intelligence. You wouldn't turn your back on your oaths just based on the evidence you've given me. You wouldn't do it unless it was the only option, and you wouldn't risk Jim's future by telling me, not over honor, or respect, or even George's memory."

He does stand now, listening to the ominous scraping of wooden chair against honest stone. The sound is like that of claws dragging, the twin beasts of their tensions prowling the room. "I've heard all the rational reasons you think this needs to be done." For a moment-- just a moment-- he pretends he's talking to George. George in his combat gear, smeared with the pinkish soot of alien earth, sensing shifts in the battlefield the way animals sense an approaching storm. "Now, tell me the irrational ones."

 

Winona advises him, in creative and scatological Klingon, to do something anatomically impossible with his studied compassion and psychoanalysis. Yet even he can read now that its only a matter of form, as an exhausted dog may snap at the very person attempting to free them from a trap. 

The way she turns from him might be mistaken for dismissal and, when she stalks over to the kitchen's long, lone window, her back is ramrod straight. Not facing him, never faltering or pausing for more than a breath, Winona Kirk finally relates the incident that touched off this panic, the same way she would present an after-action reporting to her commanding officer. Calm, correct, without editorial or embellishment.

By the time she's finished, Pike is cursing the intuition that told him there was more to this. 

Now he doesn't know _what_ to think. 

 

.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [+] _Pudvel-Tor_ \- Vulcan. Chosen, preference . (From the [VLD](https://www.starbase-10.de/vld/))  
> [+] "The debt you incurred was what hurt you. It was the _interest_ that broke your back." -- "Sun Dog", by Stephen King (Four Past Midnight, 1990).  
> [+] [Memory Beta](https://memory-beta.fandom.com/wiki/Tiberius_Kirk) lists 'Brunhilde Ann Milano' as the apocryphal name for Jim's maternal grandmother. I've shorted it to 'Ann' here. All other peripheral relations/ briefly necessary OC's are solely figments of my already questionable imagination.  
> *Uniform Code of Federation Justice  
> [+] General futurism disclaimer: none of the ficticious global, societal, and/or political commentary here is intended to reflect on anything going on anywhere in the world in RL. The goal was to follow some of the ideas implied in "Whom the G-ds Destroy" and the general isolation of colonies as portrayed in "This Side of Paradise". The author also disclaims this disclaimer and, more importantly, herself. Because, have you met that chick? She's crazy. ;-)
> 
>  
> 
> Comments and kudos are, however, are always welcome and encouraged, for they have been shown via rigorous boots-on-the-ground research to be more intoxicating to fic writers than chocolate is to Vulcans. <3


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